


Close Only Counts

by gondalsqueen



Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Family Dynamics, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-31
Updated: 2015-08-11
Packaged: 2018-03-31 06:01:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 39,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3967084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gondalsqueen/pseuds/gondalsqueen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everything they do is dangerous, so they learn to compensate. Hera has at least two backup plans for any scenario. Whenever anyone else comes along on a mission, Kanan builds in a hefty margin of error, far more than a Jedi should need. But after all, you can't really plan the future. And some falls are inevitable. </p><p>A series of scenes tracing Kanan and Hera's relationship through their years together on the Ghost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Six Months Post-Gorse

**Author's Note:**

> I have finally read A New Dawn! At some point, the first few chapters of this story will get a cosmetic edit to bring them up to speed. And guys, I mostly write this stuff so someone will talk to me about Rebels. Comments welcome.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Hera and Kanan worry needlessly about the other one, and some fun is had with speeder bikes. Because speeder bikes are the best things ever.

“Watch it! Guard rail!”

Oncoming traffic sped by a meter to their left. The closest trooper giving chase hung two lengths behind them. She didn’t bother to reply, dodging dangerously close to the rail as their pursuer took a shot. Fury mingled with the rush of adrenaline from the speed. Shots fired, on a civilian highway.

The light ahead was changing. She nursed the fuel lever up to the top of fifth gear, then punched it.

“Specter 2!” Balanced impossibly on the bike’s saddlebags, Kanan still managed to sound like he was scolding her. “Get off the highway!”  
  
“I’m _trying_ not to turn any sharp corners, _dear_!”

“Thanks for that!” She couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not. He pried off one of the bags—the empty one, she hoped—and let it fly, grinning when it hit the trooper square in the chest. She watched in the mirror as he flew off his bike and bounced against the inner lane. Every time. Did Kanan aim that well with flying debris, or was he the luckiest person in the galaxy?

Finally, he worked the contents of the other bag free, tucked the bulky package into his jacket, and jumped on behind her. “Watch out!”  
  
“I’ve got this one.” She stopped thinking and just dodged, and they cut through the intersection a good two seconds before cross traffic. Nobody would be able to follow them until it changed again. Hera took a sharp left into an alley, using the bike’s spin out to set their direction. One lek whipped into Kanan’s face, and he sputtered and scooted in closer.

“Nice driving there, Captain.”

“Nice acrobatics. Are they cracked?”  
  
Kanan spared a look at the retrieved package of datachips before tucking it back into his shirt. “Nah. Ship shape.”

“Good. Crack them.”

Incredulous, he exploded, “What?”

“First we interfere with transmissions…”

“…Then, we get the chips from the intel droids.” He knew that part. “But what’s on them?”

Not much was happening in the back alleys in broad daylight. Still, she lowered her voice to a more normal volume and leaned back to be heard over the wind. “That forum. All the people who spoke against the Empire. As soon as the footage is uploaded, those people will be picked up. We’ve got to get rid of them.”

She spoke very near his ear. A muscle in his jaw twitched, then set. Steeling himself against something, but he made no response.

“The chips, not the people,” she clarified, straightening.

“You couldn’t have told me this before I risked my neck to save them?”

“Sorry—no time. And we had to make sure they were all damaged.”  

“I can’t believe—”  But she was studiously driving, ignoring any arguments he might start. She felt his heavy sigh against her back as he gave in. “Fine.” He dangled the package into the edge of the bike’s antigrav field, next to the back axle, and they crushed quickly. Easily done. They’d just had to intercept the courier first. And hope no copies had been made yet.

Hera glanced back at the process for one second. That was when they heard it.

“Patrol transport overhead.”

“Maybe just a traffic lookout?”

“If wishes were speeders... They sound close. Right overhead."   
  
“Okay, okay. Ditch the bike, then.” Or at least hide it. She scanned the sides of the alley for any covered place to stop. Not many. The back roads had seemed like such a good idea, farther away from bystanders and harder for anyone following to navigate. Now she was beginning to feel like they were coming up against the back wall of a maze. “They certainly are proactive today.”  
  
“Not going to take them long to get boots on the ground, from that thing.”

When she stopped scanning and looked forward again, something had changed. In a city this size, there was something unnatural about the total absence of lights.  
  
“Hera, they’re _here_. —Wait.”  
  
“I see it. EMP beam.” Down from the transport, blanketing the area. Trap.

She pulled into a jackknife turn, but they were going too fast. They hit the beam sideways, and Hera remembered gripping the handlebars through the spin, checking that her tongue wasn’t between her teeth, wondering if they had zip lines, and thinking how profoundly karked they were, but she didn’t remember hitting the ground.

…

She woke to the steady drip-drip-drip of liquid and it occurred to her, half-awake, that someone ought to turn that off and stop wasting water. As consciousness returned fully, that annoyance morphed into a splitting headache down the left side of her face—the aftereffect of stun guns. Not a concussion, then. Just caught. Dumb, thinking they could succeed without an outside extraction.

From shoulders to toes, she tried everything out. Nothing but some scrapes from the chase and the ache of post-adrenaline fatigue. And she was in a holding cell alone, not the usual sea of miscreants this place called a local jail. As much trouble as she’d caused, they should have beaten her purple. No injuries, no cellmates. Interrogation, then. Well, kriff. Whose attention had they attracted?

And where was Kanan? Surely, if they hadn’t hurt her, they wouldn’t beat him, either? Yet, anyway. Divide and conquer. It had to be interrogation. 

Hera took a quick look around. The steady dripping smelled of rain and sewage. Still on-planet, then. Minimal Imperial presence here—everything this far out on the rim was still being done by contract workers. They liked to show off their expensive paramilitary gear, but what stormtroopers they had were newly trained. If she could get out of the cell, find Kanan before they called in a true Inquisitor…

She was acutely aware of just how bad it would be if they were scanned and printed for the Imperial register. Running like that would make jobs impossible. And Kanan…

…well, she was just another troublemaker. But she suspected he was rather more.

If he _was_ what she suspected, he would be fine under whatever these small-time officers threw at him. She couldn’t remember seeing any of the Jedi in action, but they were legends—trained to resist torture, able to fight off an entire contingent… at least some of those overblown stories had to be true.

But there was another issue—that metal tube he sometimes carried.  Carried disassembled, sure, but if it were confiscated, it wouldn’t take a clever engineer two minutes to put it together. And then he would become much more interesting.  

His face sprung vividly to mind, the mouth all smirk but the eyes unguarded. Green-eyed Kanan, always jumping right into the line of fire. Kanan who was wary of traps. She fought down fear expertly, having a lifetime of practice. Divide it into a problem you can handle, then, Hera. Name it.

If he carried only a blaster today, he was fine. 

If he had a lightsaber, he was potentially very screwed indeed.

She checked the confines of her cell again and willed him a blaster.

…

Kanan slumped in the interrogation cage quietly, doing a fair impression of a bored and unimaginative thug. Inside, his thoughts chased each other around a little more quickly than was useful. He hadn’t been hurt. Start with that thought. There was no reason to think Hera would be treated worse. Certainly, she wasn’t dead—Twi’lek girls were too valuable. Of course, that assurance brought up a whole new line of nightmares…

Hera was more than capable of taking care of herself.

He had to get out of here right now.

Maybe he could use the Force to persuade an officer to let them go. …Maybe.  As a padawan, he’d been too young to practice that skill much. And his abilities certainly hadn’t gotten any keener with years of neglect.

Well… he sighed and rose. He would have preferred the flashy escape of a Jedi knight, but they would have to make due with a reasonably competent cat burglar, instead. An easy thought through the force, and the cameras turned themselves towards the corner. Hopefully, nobody was actively manning them. Dispatching the lock was slightly harder, the kind of fine control work his teachers at the temple always berated him for neglecting. Finally, he just shorted the thing out and opened the door.

He almost ran into the black-uniformed guard who was coming to check on him, hand poised above the door handle, mouth open. Bad timing, good omen. No Imperials yet. “Hello,” he said, as amiable as possible.

The guard’s hand dropped to his blaster. Kanan’s hand went with it, trapping his weapon in its holster. An efficient punch to the face, and the man dropped without a sound. Good—now he had a pass key and a blaster. And maybe even a uniform.

He hadn’t gotten the man’s boots off yet before he felt that familiar bend in the Force—someone was approaching. Not the heavy boots of a trooper. Someone who was taking care to mask the sound of her own steps.

He was leaning casually against the door frame, stun gun drawn, when she rounded the corner. Hera looked at him, looked at the guard, and was unimpressed. “Show off.”

“Welcome to my party, Specter 2. Nice to see you could make it.” How had she gotten out? She had no blaster, no Force-cheat to pick the lock. He reevaluated his opinion of her for the five hundredth time, once again found that her delusions of grandeur were not quite so crazy. She always got the job done. Somehow. “By the way, how _did_ you make it?”  
  
“A girl has ways.” She dangled a pass key with a smug grin. “I have the front gate, too. We’ll need to take out the monitoring center. I’m sure they have _some_ footage of us. But if we’re fast and quiet…”  
  
He held up his own key card. “You show me yours, I’ll show you mine.”   
  
“Cute, Specter 1.” She glanced down. “Are you going to put on that guard uniform?”

“Trying to get me naked?” He was so relieved to see her.

“In your dreams. But it might be nice to have someone who could impersonate a guard, if it comes to that. I’d do it, but if I undressed, you might die of joy.”  
  
“Don’t think I could handle you?”

She opened her eyes wide and made a turning motion with her hand. The message was clear _. You’re very witty. Now get to it._ Then she took the blaster from him and kept watch for more guards.

His shirt was halfway over his head when she called nonchalantly, “Nice freckles.” Holy Force, she was looking. He was glad for the shirt over his face, hiding his blush if nothing else.

When he could see again, she was watching the hallway diligently. He cleared his throat, made quick work of the pants, put his own clothes in the small pack the guard had carried. Then the boots. “Which way to the control center, do you think?”

“We’re in the basement. Up and up. Sure to be more guards up there, though."   
  
"There are more guards down here, too. We should get going." 

“Race you to the stairs?”

“Copy that.” 

They hadn’t been captured before. So that was new. He’d been wary of capture, his own past escapes last-minute and harrowing. And he knew that it would be imprisonment, far worse than death, in the end. Taking chunks out of the Empire—even these small disruptions that they could manage—was a losing game. Sooner or later, you all ended up dead.

_“But isn’t that true of any path you choose?” Hera had asked him when he came aboard her ship. “I mean, sooner or later, you’re dead. You weren’t planning to spend your whole life running from THAT, were you?”_

_And he had replied, “’Later’ has come to have a profound significance for me.”_

They had escaped from a detention facility without the full scan. He might not be a Jedi, but he wasn’t a kid anymore, either. He ran because he was racing Hera, not because he had to run away—not anymore. And he was beginning to think they had a real shot at that ‘”later” option. _  
_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the chapter that should have been posted before the others. But it was giving me trouble then. And it's still giving me trouble, in fact. So here you go. For what it's worth.


	2. Eighteen Months Post-Gorse

They bound his hands tightly, then his feet, one to each of the four corners. His back bent painfully over the rack. Nobody had cleaned off last night’s blood. The nose—already a hawk’s nose—had been broken in at least two places. He closed those blue eyes and swallowed hard. They wrapped his bindings around primitive wheels and twisted. His shoulders stretched, then broke. They twisted more.

Hera buried her face in a bench cushion she was hugging. “Oh, I can’t watch this part.” 

“I thought you liked this vid.” 

Muffled in the pillows, “I do. This part is awful.”

Half-lying on opposite sides of the bench, they had to share space. Kanan extracted his foot from the tangle of limbs and nudged her. “Don’t stop watching. Look, the scene’s changing.”

A mute, wicked king, and the princess whispering, “A child who is not of your line grows in my belly. Your son will not sit long on the throne, I swear it.”

Hera and Kanan burst into simultaneous triumphant laughter. “Oooooh, you are kidding!” “Checkmate!”

“The prisoner wishes to say a word.”

Kanan leaned over, close to her ear to whisper. Instead, he shouted, “FREEEEEEEEEDOM!”  

She kicked him off the couch.  Incorrigible, he yelled “BONDAGE!” at the holoscreen, and pulled her onto the ground with him.

“You nerf! I wanted to watch that!”

“Thought you DIDN’T. Aaugh—HEY! Stop tickling me!”

“Ah, so he of the mystic powers succumbs to your garden variety tickling.” (That other word—for what Kanan was—or what he _might_ be—they didn’t use that word.)

“You want to be careful what you start…” He launched himself at her and began his own merciless assault.

Hera, outweighed by a good fifty pounds, didn’t see the need to fight fair. Kanan, outweighing her by a good fifty pounds, quickly discovered that he had to sit on her legs if he wanted to avoid a kick to sensitive areas and continue torturing her. “You know, deafening me with your laughter isn’t much of a defense, Hera. Ow—hey! No biting!”

Finally, she got a knee up and managed to flip him, now right under the table. “Haha!”

A solid crack against metal at the base of the table. “OW!” He fended her off half-heartedly with one hand. That had sounded bad.

“Kanan…” She backed up, wary of a trap. “Wait, are you really hurt?” 

He peeked out enough to give her a childish, grumpy look with one eye. “I think I cracked my skull open.” 

That “I” was enough to make her take pity on him. Really, he should have blamed her--she had pushed him. “Come out here. Let me take a look.”

He drug himself onto the bench. Blood streamed from the base of his skull, pooling down the back of his shirt. “Oh, good Goddess... Hold still. No, wait. Lift your arms up.” She yanked the shirt up over his head and balled it against the wound. It soaked with blood. “I’m so sorry, Kanan. Put your head down on the table. Are you dizzy? Sick?” 

“Just hurt. Not dizzy. Ow! Pushing on my head like that isn’t helping, though.” 

“Got to stop the bleeding. Hold still.” He bled in awkward silence. “I hope you didn’t like this shirt much.” A noncommittal sound from where he rested on the table. “Just kidding. I can probably get it clean.”

“Going to do my laundry now?” he asked. “I might have to get hurt more often.” 

“Speaking of,” she shot back, “I have seen you leap on the back of a speeder and jump to the top of a building, and not lose your balance. How do you split your head open under a table?”

His response was truly sulky. “I let my guard down.”

She swallowed against the double guilt of his bleeding head and his bleeding heart. They were both idealists, but she sometimes thought they walked through different worlds. Raised on Ryloth as any vestiges of an official system fell apart, Hera didn’t expect anything of people. She hoped, but she knew how hard it was for them to make dangerous decisions. When someone came through for her, she was delighted and proud, every time. Kanan, though—he was a real paladin. Every time, he expected the best of people, and more often than not, his hopes were dashed into the ground for his troubles. He’d learned cynicism along the way—too many falls, too many bumps and bruises. And then she came along, and here he was jumping off buildings for her and expecting… What? What would it mean, for her to catch him?

Bent over the table, he didn’t look much different than he had those first few weeks, sleeping off the night before. He hadn’t told her much about his past, but she wasn’t stupid. What must it have been like, for Kanan, at the end of the wars? If he could have accepted the need to blend in, fought and cheated his way up the food chain, he would have been fine. But they were too much alike. He loathed that kind of life. And the little he’d had to do to survive—Every day that he hid instead of taking the fight to the Empire, he must have felt like a failure. And every day he must have hated himself. How old could he have been, when that life started for him? She knew better, but he seemed so much younger than her, still. Things would be easier if he weren’t still so innocent. 

“Done yet? I think you’re making a knot on my forehead, too.” 

“Hmm? Oh, yeah. I think it’s stopped. Let me see.” She removed the shirt carefully. “That’s a lot of blood. Might need a few stitches.” 

“Does it?” 

She combed carefully through his hair, trying to keep it businesslike despite the beckoning softness, fingering through the curls at the base of his neck, trying not to pull.  Sweet and soft, again. Such hair she associated with young humans. Not at all like the hair on the rest of his body. “Can’t tell. All this blasted hair. You want me to shave a little piece and put on a bacta patch?” 

“Is it that bad?”

“Hmm. It’s not bleeding anymore, at least. I could wash out the blood for you, then I could see."

He peeked up, that naughty glint in his eye. “Why, Captain. Are you offering to bathe me?” 

She smacked his shoulder. “Don’t get any ideas, ace.” Hard shoulder. Soft skin. …Tapered waist… She hoped she didn’t get any ideas. 

“Yes, ma’am.” 

“Think you can make it to the sink?"

“Sure thing.” He rose, the crick in his neck so visible she winced for him. “Make me beautiful.”


	3. Two Years Post-Gorse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we learn that Hera is virtually never without a plan--sort of--and that anything you can't talk about, you probably shouldn't be doing.

Sizhranian lettuce. Mostly-still-firm tomatoes. Blue cheese. Croutons. Hera was starting on the cucumber when he walked into the galley. She was no fan of cooking in general, and slicing vegetables was her least favorite part. Kanan could see the perplexed frown even in the angle of her shoulders.

His mood, though, was too good to spoil. “Hey, lady.” Arms around her waist, small kisses on the side of her face. Designed to distract.

She twitched her head—not now. Work to do.

“Hey, sit down. Let me do that.”  
  
“I’ve got it.”

“Humor my desire for total power over the galley, and I’ll humor your OCD ways in the cockpit, okay?” He did not say: _You’re going to cut your fingers off and you’re making cabbage out of the salad._ “I’ll finish it.” The kisses resumed. “Come sit down with me for a while.”

She put down the knife, but that heavy sigh let him know they wouldn’t be having any fun. “Kanan—”

He braced himself. “We need to talk?” 

“Yeah.”

He wasn’t surprised. This had been happening more and more of late. A stolen kiss in the hallway, Hera pushing him up against a door, or melting into him willingly when he pulled her into the co-pilot’s chair. Some fantastic hour-long makeout sessions. It was enough for now. Kanan was alternately thrilled into a state of dopey joy and terrified that Hera would get cold feet and wall herself off. Of course they needed to talk. She would draw the line again, and that would be that.

Hera was his best friend. She trusted him with a lot more than kisses. So if she wanted to talk, they talked. She took him to the table, but he was the first to speak. Disarm. Make allies, not rivals. This was her training in the first place, and he tried to take it to heart. So he blurted out: “We don’t have to do anything you don’t want. Ever.”  
  
A snort of laughter. “Kanan Jarrus, I think by now you KNOW what I want.”  
  
“l—Wait, what?” He stared open-mouthed at her knowing smirk, and over the space of the next several seconds, he had an epiphany. Hera _didn’t_ relax boundaries by accident. As a matter of fact, she didn’t do _anything_ without a plan. How could he have thought those kisses were moments of weakness, that she was finally giving in to his irresistible charm?

She was surprisingly physical for someone so no-nonsense. When he was down, when he drug himself into the common room from the depths of a nightmare, she put a hand on his shoulder and kneaded. And only then did she find words _. Let me get you a cup of caf, love. I think nights are hard for everyone._ Maybe the kisses were an overture, as well.

 He felt the shit-eating grin spread over his own face. This wasn’t the letting-him-down-easy talk.  This was the OTHER kind of talk. “Oh, yeah? Tell me what you want.”

Oops. Too far. There was the scolding mom look again. “I _want_ to shake up the Empire’s operations. See if we can’t shake a few people free. Aaaaand…” There was smirky, fun Hera. “I want you.” A sigh. “But one of those things is selfish, isn’t it?” She wasn’t being smug. They’d had enough late nights around the dejarik table that she knew he would level with her, no matter what he wanted.

So he leveled. “Hera, do you want me on this ship?”

“What?” Alarm in those wide green eyes.

“Do you want me working with you? Fighting with you?”  
  
“Yes! You’re not leaving?!”  
  
“No, no. That’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m… Look…” He couldn’t find a good way to start. “I’m not distracted from the mission because of you. I’m HERE because of you. And..." Why not be honest? "I’m not going to unlove you. Ever.”

She swallowed thickly. Relief. Was she going to _cry_?  “But hey,” he grinned. “If you think kissing me is so addictive that you can’t keep your mind on the job…”  

She burst out laughing and almost crying and laughing again. “Have you been rehearsing? Because I certainly have."

“I thought you were going to tell me it was too hard having me around. You had that tense thing going on.”  
  
“I was nervous!”

He grinned, and he wondered what she saw in his face, because her own expression softened. “So—You decided anything, Captain?”

She shrugged helplessly. “I trust you. You are my best friend. But this is…dangerous.” She seemed to be fighting not to say something else. _I don’t want to lose you, either_ , he thought. And then her shoulders straightened, and discipline reasserted itself. “If we’re going to be a crew, we can’t be all torn up over something like this.”

He kept his voice gentle. “I think we’ve reached the point of no return.”

“If we try...something, and it doesn’t work out?”

Always, he had this foolish, knee-jerk need to make things all right for her. “It will be okay.”

She was giving him that look again, like he was a naïve little boy. He was pretty sure that’s how she thought of him, and gave silent thanks that she wasn’t disillusioned yet. “Nobody can promise that things will be okay. That’s not part of the deal. And I don’t want to give something, then take it back.”

He’d watched her be so, so careful with him. “So—then…?”

“One step at a time? What we’re doing—this is nice. I don’t want to put you on the spot, love, but, do you think—can we sleep together?”

Kanan was used to denying himself. Kissing--that could have been enough, physically. But he was reminded of those mornings, more and more frequent, when he couldn’t be in his bunk with the nightmares any longer, and he dragged himself out to the common area, put on a pot of caf, and fell asleep on the bench while it brewed. And he woke to Hera leaning against him, only half-awake herself and tangled up in him, stroking his hair, some forlorn need of her own—to comfort him? To seek comfort in touch? That bench was rotten uncomfortable, even compared to the bunks. Whatever was between them during those hours, neither one had satisfied it, yet.

Sleep together. Her head tucked under his chin, squeezing him back when the morning crept too close. Sleep together. Her hands slipping underneath his clothes.  Yeah. That could work. “About damn time.”

She gave him that wide-eyed, joyful, you-made-the-right-decision grin in response. “So, look. Tonight, salad.”  
  
“I was not kidding about finishing that, by the way,” he interjected.

“Yes, yes, yes. You’re a very good chef, dear.”

“Tonight, salad, then. But…sometime?”

“Definitely sometime.”

How could she be so matter-of-fact and down-to-earth and don’t-touch-me-my-hands-are-covered-in-grease-and-Chopper-is-still-in-pieces sometimes, and then give him a look like THAT, a look that told him EXACTLY what kind of time she was talking about, the next? Kanan’s throat was suddenly dry. He swallowed, tried again to speak. It did not come out quite as suave as he’d imagined. “Yeah. Catch you around.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Canon-compliant as much as possible without my having read the novels. But isn't fanfiction by its very nature AU? 
> 
> So, when does Zeb join the crew? I don't think they're quite ready to negotiate this thing in front of other people yet, and I think it takes a long time--years and years--to really come to love somebody. 
> 
> Kanan, I get. He's Jedi trained, and he's male. So of course he's willing to sacrifice himself for a cause he believes in (*cough* Hera, not the Rebellion). Once he decides he loves her, he's all on board. 
> 
> Hera, I don't get yet. Things are not so simple for her. A large part of her holding back is trying to protect the integrity of the mission, but I think she's also trying to protect Kanan, whom she sees as very fragile. But she's not like Leia, or Mara Jade, or even Ahsoka. By the time we see her in Rebels, she doesn't have that defensive edge so many Star Wars women have. So, she starts as 19-year-old "I am totally going to save the galaxy, get on board," and somehow she becomes 24-year-old "I understand that you have issues, and we will work around them, Love, and hugs whenever you need them and all that. Now I need you to get up and go save the galaxy. Teachable moment." That process has to take some work, right? What happens in between?
> 
> One thing I don't see is Hera drifting into a relationship due to a lack of restraint, this kind of "Oh, let's just mess around and see what happens" attitude. That's not safe for Kanan, and that's not conducive to staying on task. So I think she's given this kind of thing a lot of thought. But it's ultimately a bad idea in her book, so she can't come to any good conclusions. Maybe that's Hera's issue. Usually her head and her heart agree, and on the rare occasion that they don't, she's totally torn between the options. 
> 
> Oh, and Chopper's around somewhere. I love that cute little sociopath, but do you really want him in on a conversation like this?


	4. Two Years and Two Days Post-Gorse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Note the change in rating. This chapter is mostly smut. Very detailed smut. But nice smut, I hope. Slightest mention of possible non-consensual sexual stuff in the past. Blink and you'll miss it. Oh, and I sure hope Garel has mountain ranges.

Things Kanan had learned about Hera from spending two years aboard her ship:

One: When she walked, she moved with a roll of her hips, sending a bounce all the way up to her lekku. Hera did not know this. It wasn’t an invitation.

Two: Lekku were, as rumored, a sensitive area. Definitely not a place to elbow accidentally during training, or to tickle casually. Stay away unless invited.

He had confirmed this during last night’s blackout, the Ghost hiding in the thick clouds at the top of Garel’s largest mountain range, his lips running lightly down the inside of tchun. The shiver that started at her scalp and went clear to the soles of her feet—that wasn’t deliberate either. But it was an invitation.

“See, I always thought rumors about lekku were greatly exaggerated,” he murmured, the words vibrating behind the delicate peaked cone of her ear.

“Maybe.” She sighed, tensed a little more in pleasure. “Of course… of course, anywhere on the body can be…” She swallowed. His hand was wandering “…pleasant, with the right touch.”

He pulled back just a little to look at her face in the glow of the bedroom’s sparse running lights, that half-smirk, almost laughing. “ _Anywhere_ on a Twi’lek’s body?” Skepticism. It sounded so much like material from those porno vids.

Hera had crossed her arms over bare breasts and quirked one tattooed eyebrow at him. Leaning against the pillows in the mostly dark, the effect was rather lost. “Anywhere on a WOMAN’S body, love.”

They’d compared notes before. Kanan had, numerically speaking, more experience than Hera, though he suspected she’d usually stuck around longer. But last night had been…eye opening.

That was the first time, in the dark. Today was the second time, lamps on, his hands tracing over the green glow of surreally smooth skin. He intended to do a little research into these theories. Observation. For science, of course.

“Hera…” he traced her jaw.  
  
“Hmm?” Her eyes were closed, concentrating more on what he was doing than what he was saying.  
  
“ _Anywhere_ on a woman’s body?”  
  
She heard the smirk in his voice and grinned at him in response. “Want to find out?”

His thumb brushed the pulse point in her neck, and he watched her breath catch. “You bet I do.” The straight line of a collarbone beckoned. He started there, tracing fingertips across it and down her breastbone. The green flush that had started in her face deepened along her neck. Muscles twitched. He felt himself twitch in instant response. “So, good there, then.”  
  
She hummed a response low in her throat, and he swallowed. If even that amount of vibration was going to have this effect on him, he wouldn’t last out this experiment. Lower, down the side of one breast, her nipples the color of evergreens. By the time he reached her stomach (so unbelievably smooth, the dip of her navel a slight curve), all the muscles from there to her thighs were twitching. He glanced up to her face again, and found that she was watching him intently. “Come here.”  
  
Obligingly, he stretched out beside her, biting back a groan as one very deliberate thigh wriggled against his groin. She turned towards him, but he kept one hand on her hip—not forcing, just suggesting. “Not yet. I’m not done exploring yet.” A skeptical look on her part, so he asked, “Is that okay?”

She nodded, then protested, “But you’re doing all of the work, and I’m having all of the fun.”

He pressed his hips against her thigh again. “Do I seem like I’m not having fun?”

“Suit yourself then, love.” She rolled obligingly to her back, but not before running her fingers naughtily down his chest and stomach and just the slightest bit lower. She was going to be the death of him. He just wanted to live to make it to her toes, first.

“Why, Hera, you’re a little tense.” Palm running along thigh, kneading here and there. “Here, let me help.” Fingers trailing after, undoing any good that pretense of a massage had done. When he finally stroked lightly, teasing, between her legs, she was far past making jokes. No hair at all—he hadn’t realized just how exposed that would leave her. Even modestly spread, she glistened. He dipped in an experimental finger, stroked up, and was rewarded with a full throated moan. His erection answered with a bittersweet tug, pulling at his balls, winding his own abdomen into a tight coil. Oh, Force, did he want… He stroked again and elicited a sharp sigh. Then she was running her tongue across her own hand, and reaching down to surround him in one tight, slick fist. Ever giving Hera.

He didn’t mean to do it. There was no conscious reaching out, no push. But her fingers wrapped around him and her barely open eyes met his, and somehow it closed the circuit. That sixth sense opened up, and he felt her through the Force, a bright green flame, hot and alive.

And moving her wet fist on him. He let out a groan of his own and felt, through that connection, her pleasure spike in response. Shakily, she teased, “So much hair. How do you keep from chafing?”

His voice was rough. “Keep going and you’ll find out.”

An answering grin, something softer, less urgent from her. Affection. He put his hand over hers, stilling it. “Just hold. I want to make this last.” She obliged. Mostly. He hadn’t predicted what an imp she could be in the bedroom. Then he stopped teasing, nudged her thighs a bit further apart, and just touched her, slowly, or quick and light, drawing her own dampness upwards over that swollen bud that was so much like human anatomy, watching her face and reading the ripples of her pleasure to learn what she liked. Hera’s face. Tight with pleasure. He really might die.

He dipped a finger truly inside of her, lightly, then pushing past muscles to reach more deeply, and he felt her hand on his wrist at the same instant she closed off in the force. “No.” Not angry, just firm.  
  
“You okay?”

“Mmm hmm.” She nodded.  
  
“Want me to stop?”

A shake of her head. She held his hand between her legs, then splayed her fingers over his and guided. Quick, efficient strokes. He felt her reassert her own will over—whatever that had been—make the decision to sink into pleasure again, and then she was back. She was fine.

He let her guide his hand and watched her face. What did her own past contain? He knew the outlines, but only in broad strokes. He suspected he would learn to fill in some of the details. And here she was, enjoying him—taking charge of her own pleasure, even—Captain Hera. A very different ache made itself at home in his chest. She was so tough it was hard to breathe.

And she was beginning to undulate her hips against their hands in a very urgent way, indeed. Force help him, he knew _that_ rhythm.  She sucked in a deep breath, then pressed his hand down, still. Waiting. “Come up here.” Her voice was hoarse.  
  
“Just a minute. I have something to finish up, first.” He watched her face. She had to be close. Any little thing…

He pressed the length of one finger along her and watched her shatter, her orgasm sending ripples out through her body. He had a sudden vision of himself buried inside her, squeezed tight, feeling her go off through the force and his now desperately hard cock, and he said a quick prayer that it was a vision of the future. A beatific relaxation spread over her.

 And then almost instantly, her eyes snapped open, playful. “My turn.”

“Hera, it’s fine. Take a minute.”

She brushed his protestations aside with a grand wave of her hand, then sat up, full of some joyful energy, still game.  “My exploration is going to be a little less about watching…” She pushed him back, slid on top of him, brushed his erect tip ( _Holy Force, I am not going to last for long_ ) against her entrance. “…And a little more about doing.” Then she sank onto him, around him, endlessly tight, and his hands found her hips and gripped, right there, that was where he belonged, and if there was anything of the lovers’ game remaining, it was swept out of Kanan’s mind right then.  He looked up at her above him like a pillar, and knew that he would lay down anything and everything at her feet.


	5. Three Years Post-Gorse

They knew things would change when they took on a crew.

“Specter 4, are you with us?” Bolts of blaster fire crisscrossed her field of vision, catching the light of the smoke grenades they’d thrown to cover their escape. The effect was half haunted house, half Empire Day.

Muffled clanking over the comm reassured her—a fight. Then a cough—the smoke. “Just taking some time for whack-a-vrelt, Specter 2. Be there in a mo.”

Having Zeb in a firefight was fantastic. Well, not that a firefight was ever fantastic. But they were holding off—Hera counted the path of the blaster bolts—twelve troopers? Ha! Twelve troopers!

More were coming. “We need an exit strategy, Specter 2.”

“I’m on it, Specter 4.”

Somehow they had cleared the upper platform, meaning that the only thing between them and the escape pods was a lot of blaster fire. At the back of the platform, they were safe as long as they crouched. Until the stormtroopers advanced, anyway. To make a run for the pods, they’d need a little more cover.

Luckily the upper platform contained a mounted canon, a beautiful hulk of pre-Clone-Wars gunsteel. What cover! Hera stepped behind it and slammed down the lever to lower its position. Even armored troops would have a hard time advancing through canon fire.

Kanan leaped to the edge of the platform, dodging shots like—well, like only Kanan could—that sidearm of his at the ready. Right in front of her. Right in her line of fire. “I’ll cover you,” he shouted. “Get to the pods.”

“Negative, Specter 1. I’ve got this. Move.”

“Get out of here, Specter 2. I’ll catch up in a minute.” He jumped off the platform and into the waiting smoke, no time for debates.

Hera cursed prolifically under her breath but made a dash for the escape pods. To his credit, the fire certainly was lighter now. Zeb waited while she skipped two rungs up the ladder to the pods, then swung himself up. “We’re going to wait for Kanan, right? That’s still the plan?”

“Oh yeah. He’s not going suicidal on us. At least not the way you’re thinking.” She, on the other hand, might kill him. She concentrated on strapping in. Just do the mission, Hera.

Kanan was barely breathing hard when he joined them in the pod a minute later, just as he’d promised. Whatever anger was blossoming in her became a full-blown eruption. He could at least have the decency to look rattled.

Now everybody had a clear role. Zeb slammed the hatch closed and hit the eject button, and the g-force pushed them back against the seat rests as they were launched off the space station. Kanan found his detonator, counted down until they reached a safe distance, and blew the entrances to the docking bays. At least they’d have a little head start. Hera fished the internal commlink out of her thigh pocket. “Chopper, we’re ready for pickup. Everything as originally planned.” The droid chirped a bored-sounding affirmative and she secured the link in her pocket once more.

Zeb held up a package of silica power cells, “Check this out.”

Kanan gave a low, appreciative whistle.

“These lovelies ought to fetch a nice price with the moisture farmers, eh?”

“And,” Kanan propped his arm on the seat back, satisfied, “that ought to hold off terraforming on Oseon for a few more weeks. Enough time for an evac to start.”

“I could get used to this team stuff.”

And that was when Hera let him have it. “What the kriffing kriff fracking…” she struggled, “ _karabast_ was that?”

The boys froze, eyes wide in innocent, frightened protest.

Zeb broke the silence, clearing his throat awkwardly. “Glad to see you’re picking up new languages, Hera…”  
  
“Not you, Zeb. YOU—“ She stabbed a finger at Kanan, who should have known better than to play innocent.

“What was what? Saving your life?”  
  
Her response was so animated that he actually tried to move back in his seat. “That little display of nerfshit _heroics_ back there, Kanan.”

“You mean me covering you and Zeb so you could get to the pod?”

“Hey, leave me out of this,” Zeb put in.

“I mean you jumping in front of the gun I was _already using_. I had it covered, _dear_.”

“And how were _you_ going to get to the pod?”  
  
“The same way you did. _With my legs_.”

“Hera, you know you didn’t stand the same chance I did, making that run. Look, I don’t know why you’re so angry. I made a call in the field and followed it through. We have to be flexible all the time.”  
  
“We also have to work together. If you’re going to try to do everything on your own, why don’t you just go _do_ it on your own?” If this had been the first time—if it had been the tenth time—she would never have been so petty.

“Maybe I should. Maybe you should just set up the missions, and let me and Zeb take care of the rest.” Kanan heard the words and winced, his desire to call them back visible. But it was too late for that.

Hera opened her mouth to fire back and found that she was actually speechless. And Zeb was looking at them both with interested eyes, a large, hairy, inappropriate fly on the wall. She took a deep breath, tried to get some perspective, failed. She had a temper certainly, but she was seldom out of control angry like this, and never about such a detail. Quiet, burning, make-the-Empire-pay anger? Sure. Clean-this-up-and-get-out-of-my-way-before-I-make-you-degrease-the-septic-system anger? All the time. But this… She rolled the taste of her rage around in her mouth, a new sensation, and tried to name it. Fear, of course. Disappointment. _Betrayal_. That’s what it was.

Kanan was avoiding her eyes now, feeling the unfamiliar footing himself. This wasn’t right. The things she wanted to scream at him—they wouldn’t help him see anything. She’d have to try something else. Hera let go of that immediate fury with a deep sigh and watched both of the boys untense as well. “Don’t get too comfortable,” she cautioned. “We’ll be talking about this later.”

Zeb opened his mouth to protest his innocence. “Not you, Zeb.”

He shrugged. “Better and better.”

She turned to look out the port, literally giving them the cold shoulder. They would talk, then. She’d have to be ready with something more constructive. In the viewport, the Ghost grew to a recognizable shape as she tried to sort it all out.

For one thing, Kanan was genuinely taken aback. She watched him go from glower to defensive sulk to sheepish non-apology over the course of the pod ride. He had been wrong ( _idiotic_ ) to upend her plan like that. But that tension between them for months now—how much was really his fault, and how much was hers?

They knew it would be different, taking on another crew member. And they knew it would get harder, now that Fulcrum had a spy network firmly established and was beginning to feed them assignment after assignment. And Zeb was… Zeb was the kind of find you didn’t pass up. In theory, they’d been looking for more crew for the last three years. In practice, he was the only one with the skill and the resilience (and the loneliness, she reminded herself) to join them. Difficult but genuine. Zeb left his wet laundry on the fresher floor and had nothing but a sarcastic comment when asked to remove it. Zeb wasn’t as careful as he should be about civilians—although she suspected that callousness was a necessary charade for him. Zeb sang Lasat opera in the shower and his voice was amazing.

They hadn’t expected other things to change.

Some of their indulgences they gave up immediately. Pushing Kanan up against the counter of the galley, hands on his hips, _Chopper’s going to be mad_ , and _It’s all right, love, I’ve already turned off the heat. Dinner will wait._ Those moments, of course, went right away.

Others weren’t really an issue of who was at fault. Kanan was scared. ”We can’t let anyone know about us. I won’t make you a target.” She wondered who he was seeing in his past when he looked over her shoulder like that.

“I think that ship has sailed, love,” she had replied, but he shook his head.

“No, ISB might come after you now. But not the Inquisitors. Sooner or later, they’re going to figure out what I am. And then—they won’t stop, Hera. They’ll hunt me down no matter where I run. We’ll have to figure out an exit strategy when that happens.”

He meant an exit strategy for her. And that was the beginning of her anger. “You think if they don’t know about us, I’ll be safe? You think I’m going to stand aside and cut my losses, is that it?”

But he still had that haunted look. And then she had misheard him. Not _I don’t want to lose you_ , as she had first thought. Worse: “I don’t want them to use you.”

She had sighed. No use trying to talk to him when he was seeing the past. So she’d switched to practical instead. “Well, Zeb is going to figure it out if he stays on the ship for long. And I hardly think our sex life is the most sensitive information we could trust him with. If you’re really so worried, better to just be careful with this—“ and she’d touched the empty holster at the back of his belt, where he never kept his lightsaber.

But his eyes were hooded by those brows. He still worried.

Other changes that crept in are on her. The thermostat was set lower to accommodate the Lasat’s body temperature. Hera forewent her typical tank and cargo pants and wore a full flight suit to keep warm. (And, if she was honest, to keep comfortable. Zeb was a stuffed Wookie and a prematurely cranky old man rolled together, but the ship felt so much less private.) She slipped out of Kanan’s bed after he fell asleep to catch up on reports for Fulcrum and ended up falling asleep in the cockpit or going back to her own bunk. Even the fact that so much more correspondence with Fulcrum existed—well, it was more reminder that she was in the loop and he was cut out. (“No, you’re right, it’s better that way.” He sincerely meant that, but he sounded less and less happy about it.)

And as for any casual affection… Kanan had been the one to voice fear, but she’d been the one to show that fear in her body language. He had finally cornered her last night, after she slipped out of his embrace with an eye towards the open galley door. “Hera, is this—this thing between us… Do _you_ want it to be secret?”

He seemed so hurt and confused that she’d dodged: “I just want to make sure we look professional, like we’re staying focused on the job,” which was mostly true. By this time, she’d walked right past so many stupid, childish fears, but this last one remained firmly in place. _Don’t be like those girls, those Twi’lek girls, always putting on a show_ … She knew it was a silly hang-up, but she still jumped away from Kanan’s touch when Zeb walked in. And then he was hurt and she was ashamed of herself.

So she was Busy. With the Mission. Thank you very much. And Kanan slunk away and reverted to so many of his old ways. He hadn’t started drinking again—at least, she didn’t think so, she’d left him alone so many evenings lately—but he had started looking for more creative ways to get the job done. Jumping into a haze of blaster-bolts had been the most recent of a growing line of such stunts.  
  
No, that wasn’t fair. When she’d found him, he’d been bent on saving his own life, but only because he’d given up on his soul. These last few years of trying to unspool the Empire’s wrongs had given him back his hope and his center. Now he was trying to do the right thing. But he thought the right thing was paying some debt he didn’t really owe. Every time he jumped off the ship with that cocky smile—“I’ll handle this one—“ he was half hoping to get killed, to prove himself worthy of his past.

“You can only martyr yourself once, love,” she’d said, doing some cornering of her own after the last assignment. And he’d shrugged her off and gone to the hold to lift weights, sick of her give-and-take affection.

The Ghost filled her viewport. Hera took the minimal controls, redirecting and firing the four boosters to line them up with the hatch. Almost home. She would have to make a decision.

She was reminded of an old proverb, a Jedi thing she’d learned from Kanan: No man can serve two masters. Kanan could not give himself to her. She was just a holding pattern. He didn’t see that, either.

And if they couldn’t change, they would have to break and start over.

They docked and had no sooner exited the pod before the Ghost took on that familiar hum of a ship going to hyperspace. Hit and dodge. Always running away. Hera stomped to the cockpit to check on coordinates. Kanan followed her, an irritating habit he had of pursuing everything to its end, no matter how badly that end turned out. _You need to walk away, love, and let me cool off before we both say something epically stupid._ She thought it at him, but he didn’t pick up on it. So when they finally got to the cockpit—Zeb had wisely disappeared—she turned on him. “Shut the door.”  
  
He did. “Look, Hera, I’m sorry you didn’t get to shoot that gun.”

She shook her head, unbelieving. “You think that’s what this is about?”

He stared at her bewildered for a moment. “…And I’m really sorry for what I said about leaving you on the ship. I didn’t mean it.”

“No. That’s not it.” Because he did mean it, she knew. If she would stay safely on the ship, he could pull his stupid, risky stunts without putting her in danger. Never since that first day had he doubted her ability, her right to be an equal partner in the risks they took. Things were getting worse.

She took a deep breath and told herself for the hundredth time that this was necessary. It was healthy. “Kanan Jarrus, you need to decide what you want. Do you want me, or do you want to keep trying to get killed saving people who died a long time ago?”

“No.” She watched the steel come into his face, watched the blast door slide into place. These were some of the things they did not talk about. “You don’t get to say that. I left that behind a long time ago. I’ve dedicated _everything_ to you, Hera. Hell, I’m standing on your ship! So don’t tell me—“ and he jabbed a finger in her face “—don’t tell me not to care for the people who raised and protected me.”

“I’m not telling you you shouldn’t care! Why would I—? I just—" Stupid, wrong words. He was looming over her now, every protective instinct raised. At her. But at this point they had to go on. She took a deep breath and gentled her tone, for what little that was worth. “Kanan. Love. Getting yourself killed won’t prove anything. And it certainly won’t help anyone. I won’t be left wondering about the next time you’re going to jump off a platform into blaster fire, just for fun. I’m not going to do that to myself. And I will _not_ be the person who stands by and lets you think those kind of needless risks are all right. You’ve got to lose the martyr complex and dedicate yourself to the future. Or—“

“Or?” He challenged. Kanan Jarrus did not take kindly to threats.

But their attention was called by the beep of a new message coming in. Hera sighed.  
  
“Never mind,” he told her. “We can finish this later. You take your secret spy report in private.” And there was so much bitterness in his voice that she regretted how far she’d pushed it. She tried not to open old wounds most of the time, she really did. But staying away from them just wasn’t helping them heal.

The door whooshed closed behind him.

__

She went looking for him a half hour later. Kanan wasn’t in his room, but Zeb had his door open. “Storm blow over?” he asked, purposely careless.  
  
“I don’t think so. Sorry.”

He shrugged huge shoulders and went back to work, tinkering with that power staff thing. She wondered what it was like for him, staying put for the first time in a long time. She’d watched his need to ignore the details. His need to hit things and feel the impact instead of a more elegant treatment. Like a big, hurt kid _. Yeah, well, I don’t care._ But he did care. What was it her tutor used to say? Scratch a cynic, and you'll find a disappointed idealist. They were a ship full of sorry cases. Specters. 

She finally found Kanan in the galley stress cooking. Without comment she called up the message on the table’s projector, clipped it to show the data segment only, and left. She couldn’t bring herself to walk far from the door. So when he rushed out five minutes later, there she stood, and they almost collided.

“Hera—“

“I know.”

“Please. I need to do this.”

“I know. I’ve already changed course.”

Rumors of force sensitive children raised at an internment camp in the Baros system. Too heavily guarded to be practical. Almost certainly a trap. Even if not, certainly a disaster.

_Of course, love. Of course I’ll help you sacrifice yourself._

His shoulders relaxed and tense brooding Jedi Kanan became simply Kanan. Kanan who rolled his eyes in the copilot’s seat when he thought she was overreacting and didn’t care that she could see the reflection in the viewport. Kanan who brought her delicious cups of caf and then tickled her side, knowing that she couldn’t retaliate without spilling on her control panel. Kanan, who was endlessly stubborn and frustrating and also the person she could go to, no matter what went wrong.

“Thank you,” he said. And then his mouth formed around the apology, considered what would work. “And I really am sorry—about what I said in the pod.”  
  
She kept her eyes on his shoulder. “I think we—you and I, I mean—I think we should call this relationship quits for a while.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Show, don't tell? Pfffft! It's cool that we're mostly listening to Hera think in this chapter, right?
> 
> Also, I never expected to quote George Carlin. Thanks for the bit about idealists, Mr. Carlin.


	6. Three Years, Nine Months Post-Gorse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is very short, but I kind of like it.

Blaster fire in the hold. Hera checked the sensors. They weren’t under attack. How could anything be already _in_ the ship? She double checked the sensors, double checked her own blaster at her side, and ran for the hold.

The door was already open and she was met with a surprisingly peaceful scene. Kanan lacing his hands together to make a toehold. Sabine bracing a gloved hand on his shoulder and placing her foot there. “Now I’m going to toss you really high this time. No—leave your blaster in its holster until you get up there. You’ll need to dodge and draw, because I’ll be taking shots too. Ready?”

Black and orange hair nodded, then a practice boost—“One, two, three,” and then Sabine… well, she _flew_.

Bodies pushed beyond what was physically possible. Kanan using the force to toss her like a stone, to create something superhumanly beautiful. He drew his own blaster and took a fair shot, but Sabine had angled herself to twist in the air, and she managed to draw and fire before hitting the ground and rolling gracefully over one shoulder. She came out of the roll and up on one knee, blaster in position, this time pointed at Kanan with deadly accuracy. She was grinning in a way Hera seldom got to see.

She loves this, Hera realized. It’s like giving the Academy back to her, part of what she was so good at before.

Kanan caught sight of her across the hold and cleared his throat awkwardly, free hand going to the back of his head to smooth his hair. A familiar motion. “Uhm, they’re stun blasters,” he told her. “Not going to tear a hole in the side of the Ghost.”

She smiled back at him. “Don’t let me stop you.”

Kanan turned to Sabine. “You up for an audience?”

“Are you kidding me? I _live_ for an audience.”

“All right, then. That was pretty impressive coordination, but it’s not going to do you any good if your shots aren’t accurate. And I’m taking it easy on you. Try making that jump with the helmet this time.”

He caught Hera’s eyes across the room for just a second, and she knew what he wanted. _See? Does this mean something?_

She held his gaze, steady. _I see._

And she did. Something was changing. Zeb and Kanan had quickly become old buddies in a way that often left Hera out. They didn’t bother to think about how late it was the night before an assignment or about how much blue vomit there would be five minutes after they attempted to shotgun the gallon of milk. She was left being the disciplinarian, whereas once Kanan would have watched these things for himself. Sometimes she thought he was making up for the other adolescence, the one he missed. Other days she was pretty sure he did it on purpose. He still resented her drawing and holding that line between them.

So when he made these gestures—ceding to her plan for a mission, pointing out that he could have taken a more dangerous route—it was almost irritating. Like bringing her flowers and ignoring the power couplings and thermal insulators she really needed. Just a symbolic offering.

But Sabine… Sabine had changed things. Zeb could take care of himself, maybe that was it. Honestly, Sabine could take care of herself too. The girl came equipped with her own armor and an attitude that was even harder to get through. But for all of her capability—and she was impressively able to get the job done—she was still so young and so small.

Kanan didn’t treat the missions the same with Sabine around. Gone were the days of making an exit in the flashiest way possible. Gone the days of stopping to gloat at the guards. Now they worked as a team and they stuck to the plan. Or if they didn’t (because what plan ever went as expected?), he had several backup plans in place. Sabine herself was so showy, so reckless. Who stopped to paint a picture while running away from stormtroopers? Hera suspected that Kanan was trying to show her another way.

She’d patted him on the cheek before they left yesterday.

“I’m off to save the galaxy, again!” He was purposely lighthearted.

“Be a good role model,” she’d said.

And he had rolled his eyes and groaned. “Have you seen that girl? Did you see the pyrotechnics she set off last night? She’s an arsonist, I’m telling you. Talk to _her_ about setting a good example for _me_.”

Hera had grinned and said only “Be safe,” then turned to double check the control panel.

In the cockpit viewport, she saw his hand reach out and hover over her shoulder before he decided against and dropped it back by his side, defeated. “We will,” he said. “Promise.”


	7. Three Years, Ten Months Post-Gorse

“No, don’t! It will hurt. It will HURT!”

Hera knelt in front of the little girl. Tears threatened. The contents of the med pouch Hera carried at her hip were spread neatly on the seat of the wagon next to them. They were both examining a large gash on her arm.

Repackaging the uncle’s scattered crates, Kanan watched them.

“I know. But we have to get it clean and wrapped up. Then we can leave it alone. I’ll blow on it if it stings, okay?”

A tearful nod. Hera took advantage of that assent before the child could change her mind, pouring antiseptic rinse on the gash with quick, practiced moves, and then blowing on the arm with all her might. The girl’s howls turned to whimpers. Taking the burn away.

When the child quieted completely, Hera stopped. “Whew! See? Not so bad. This part won’t hurt.” She took the little girl onto her lap, needing both hands for the tube of bacta and the row of butterfly bandages.

Kanan turned his attention back to the farmer and the three felled stormtroopers. “You didn’t show them ID?”

The man shook his head. “There wasn’t time.”

“Good.” He scooped up two metal spheres, the remains of Sabine’s latest project. “These are stun grenades. Modified EMP pulses attuned to local Imperial frequencies. Most of the time when they wake up, they’re a little dopey, anyway. I don’t think they’ll connect this back to you.” For once, he was lucky to be on a planet so poor they still used beasts of burden to pull their goods to market. A landspeeder might have shorted out, too.

The man nodded, the quick, worried motion of someone who still doesn’t quite believe that he’s escaped. “If you hadn’t found us when you did…”

A dismissive shrug. Kanan could sense when someone was winding up for an expansive, dramatic thank you, and he never knew what to do with them. “Next time, maybe let them have the shipment?”

“It’s not just that. They said we owed them another trade tax for entering the city with market goods. All these new tariffs—who can keep up? I didn’t have that kind of money on me, so they were going to take me in.”

Kanan grinned. “And that’s when your niece decided on vigilante justice?”

Their new friend chuckled. “Yes. She’s too feisty for her own good.” They glanced over at the girls again. Hera was tying off a piece of gauze and finishing a story. “Your friend is good with children.”

Kanan swallowed past the pain in his throat. “She’s good with everyone.”

The man looked away, mindful of some more serious meaning that was not for him. “I didn’t catch your name. I suppose you don’t have one?” 

“None worth mentioning.”

“Still. You didn’t have to stick your neck out for us.”

“My pleasure.” Simple pleasantries.

“You do this often?” with a glance at the grenade.

“Too often.”

And then a more difficult question: “Why?”

How did he answer that? Because it’s right? Because I can’t settle down and get a normal job while the authorities are pulling little girls off transports on the next street? But maybe he couldn’t settle down and get a normal job, anyway. He’d certainly been raised for this kind of life. And then there were other reasons. He settled for simply, “I met a girl in a bar, once. She convinced me I was wasting my time on other pursuits.”

The farmer shook his head, confused but willing to let it go. Hera lifted the girl onto the wagon seat. On the edge of his senses, something was coming. Kanan’s brows knit together. “Get going. More troops soon.” The man swung into the driver’s seat and turned to say one last thank you. “No time!” Kanan told him. A nod of his head and the wagon was gone, moving quickly through the emptier streets at the edge of town.

Hera was watching him. “Do we have time to leave?”

“Nope, too late. Too late to hide the bucketheads, too. Cover.” He pointed to the crates at the far end of the alley and they took off in a sprint.

“Somehow our hiding never ends well.”

“Yeah, well, it’s all part of fighting the good fight.”

They ducked behind the crates. Hera wriggled farther back, making room for him. Between the slats, they could see what was happening. It was good cover. “Sabine’s new stunners worked great,” she murmured.

He grinned back at her. “Yeah, I think she got the frequencies dead on this time. Did you help her with the electrical?”

“A little. She’s passing me in that area, though.”

“Maybe they can be salvaged.”

And then she held her fingers to her lips as the speeders skidded to a halt and the stormtroopers jumped off to check on their fallen fellows.

Three of them, helping up the ones who were just starting to stir. A question asked over some intercom they couldn’t hear. Heads shaking. Six Imps, and three mostly incapacitated. Not a difficult mark. Probably wasn’t anything useful in their saddlebags, but you never knew.

Hera’s eyes were boring holes into the side of his face. He turned to look at her, shrugged in assent _. I know. Not part of the plan._ Her eyes relaxed into a smile. _Thank you_.

When he looked back, they had found something. At first a slat was blocking it and he couldn’t make out what they were examining. Then one trooper handed it to another, and he saw a flash of red, and it clicked. The little girl’s head scarf. An unusual color here. Significant. Traceable. He turned back to meet Hera’s eyes and saw his own thoughts mirrored there. _Oh karabast._

His eyes dropped to her blaster, out and readied. All right, then. We finish cleaning up. Kanan dialed his own blaster high enough to get through the armor, felt Hera’s taps on his shoulder. One. Two Three. He came out blasting. She was right behind him.

They took four before the stormtroopers registered that they were being attacked. The fifth stepped in front of his remaining comrade and fell while he was drawing his blaster. The last one jumped on his bike and sped away, no doubt waiting for a safe distance to call for help. Kanan picked up the child’s scarf and tucked it well into his vest while he cursed. Hera had already jumped on a bike and was waiting for him.

And that’s when they heard the reinforcements. “Well, that was fast.”

“Must have been the blaster fire.”

Another half dozen troops, blocking off the exit of the alley. More approaching. No, more here already. They’d drawn too much attention in this area lately.

“Want to try to break the line?” She offered him a hand.

He counted ten.  Less a line than a crowd in this narrow alley.

“Nope. I’ve ridden on a speeder with you before. Into the buildings.” He grabbed her hand, pulled her off the bike, started her moving, and she went with the spin and kept up. Through the doorway side by side. Just like old times.

“I told you, hiding never works for us.”

“Never say never. Up and up. Your words.”

She clicked on the comm while they took the stairs. “Specter 3, are you on comms? Specter 4? Good. We’re going to need a rooftop pickup.”

Zeb’s tinny voice reached them, dripping with mock consternation. “Why, Specters 1 and 2! Is that BLASTER fire I hear? I thought you were going to the market.”

Kanan shouted the answer. “Yeah, well, we ran into some complications.”

“Did you at least get the grub?”

“…Not exactly.”

“And by not exactly—” he was loving this, “—you mean ‘no.’”

Hera took a turn. “Are you going to pick us up, or not?”

“Phantom on its way, but we’re not in the neighborhood. Keep your beacon on.”

“Meet you on the roof."

Six flights up at top speed. They saved the rest of their breath for climbing. Then the roof access hatch. “Those speeders are just repulsorlift, right? Can’t make it this far off the ground?” 

“Basic model. We should be good.” Hera pushed the hatch open. Sunlight burst in with the bang of falling metal. “In theory.” She pulled herself up and rolled, making room for him.

The roof was empty and bleached-sunlight bright. Kanan shut the hatch hard behind him and used his blaster to fuse it closed. “What’s your money on? Zeb or the TIES show up first?”

“Oh, Zeb. I’ll always take Zeb.” She peered over the edge of the building, ducked back in time to miss the blaster shot. Most of the stormtroopers were on their way up the stairs behind them. A few remained on the ground. “Of course, it’s just hope. They have some kind of crate down there by the way.”

Kanan check the other side. “Oh, you have got to be kidding me!”

“What?”

“Remember that shipment we failed to intercept last week?”

“The one that was not your fault?”

“Let it go, Hera. I think I know what was in it.” He dialed his blaster higher.

“I don’t like that. What?”

“Paramilitary gear. This crate is full of OOM12s.”

“Those little probe droids with the rockets?”

“And blasters.”

Hera made a dismissive sound. “Cheap gear. Although… I think they’re setting up more over here. They must really like us.”

“Or want to use their new toys.”

“Either way, here they come.”

Kanan grinned, a flash of teeth. “This is going to be like a cantina game.”

“Careful…”

“You like my cantina games.”

She smiled at the side of the building. “I kind of do.”

The troopers deployed the droids on all four sides. Kanan took one corner, Hera the other. For a few minutes he thought, _We are going to get them all. Nothing they can throw at us will be enough._ They had hit their groove, years of working together making a near perfect game. Five droids, then fifteen, then twenty at a time…

But there were just too many, and the building was too big for the two of them to cover with hand blasters. Before long a few droids managed to get onto the roof, and then they had to divide their attention between problems.

It reminded him of his much younger days. He could take out a near infinite number of their enemy, given time. And these weren’t really even battle droids—just glorified shockballs with blasters. But they kept coming, no matter what. How did they fit so many into those crates? He shot one over Hera’s shoulder and took out four more on his side. “You think we have a bounty on our heads?” he wondered.

She considered the missions they’d been running recently. “Yeah, probably. Maybe they don’t know it’s us, particularly, but…they’re obviously mobilized.”

He shot five that were coming up directly beneath him.

She looked up for a second to reply and saw it. “Kanan, starboard.”

He whirled, blasted the two droids. Three more were on her. She took them out with efficient shots, but they’d lost too much time. Now an entire wave was up on the roof.

“Middle!” he shouted.

They met in the middle of the roof, back to back. “How many do they have?” “Where the hell is Zeb?” “He was clear across the sector. Give him time.” “They’ve got to be almost out of these things.”

Then they just shot.

When they stopped, the roof was clear. They took a moment to breathe. When they risked looking at each other, Hera gave him the biggest grin he’d seen in a long time.

“That was exactly like a cantina game,” he asserted.

“Check your side?” she suggested.

He nodded. She checked, too. Blaster shots. “…A few stragglers over here. Careful.”

Peering over the edge, Kanan found a stray of his own. It drifted up, level with his head. “Sorry, little guy,” he told it, raising his blaster. A faint boom from the other side of the building. “And watch it,” Hera said. “It looks like they’ve activated self—”

Kanan shot. The droid exploded in his face. 

He regained consciousness halfway to the ground. The concussion from the blast must have knocked him over the edge. No time to stop his fall, but he could at least use the Force to break it. Keep your spine straight, padawan. Don’t let your head snap around.  

Hitting the ground hurt. A lot. He knew he was conscious only because of the pain. The stormtroopers must have been converging on him, but he couldn’t tell. Next, vision returned. A second later and he would have missed it.

Hera diving from the top of the building, catching the fire escape with an arm. A shot. A trooper down. She tucked into a flip and jumped the balconies on the fourth floor, then went straight down the drainpipe, rappelling with one hand. A blast. Blast blast. Then her feet touched the ground, and she’d dropped the remaining troops.

A shot to the controls of the building’s door and the rest of the unit was trapped, supposing they gave up on getting through the roof hatch in the first place. She’d bought them a few more minutes.

Which was good, because he wasn’t going anywhere. Hera bent over him now. “Can you talk? Did you hit your head? What hurts?” Those eyes. The horror still hadn’t left her face. He couldn’t have that.

“Be still my beating heart.”

“Kanan—”

“Nobody’s going to believe you just did that. Wish I’d recorded it.”

“KANAN—”

“I’m all right.” He wasn’t. His chest had filled with the stinging pain of broken blood vessels. He took her hand and rolled up, and the numb, buzzing feeling that had been vibrating in the rest of his body—adrenaline after a fall—coalesced in his back. He groaned and fell back without meaning to give up.

“Not okay.”

He watched the gears turning in her head at a million parsecs per minute. “Don’t move.” She clicked the comm on again and yelled instructions for a ground evac so quickly he only caught half the words. Her voice sounded terrible.

“What’s that?” Zeb was having the same trouble. “Slow it down, Specter 2.”

She took a deep breath and forced herself to pause between words. “Specter 1 is down. You can retract the wings halfway and bring her in between the buildings. Then give the controls to Specter 3 and bring down a stretcher. Full immobilization.”

Kanan opened his mouth to protest. “YOU—” She told him. “Don’t move.” 

“Yes, ma’am.”

Zeb knew better than to waste time with more questions.  “Sixty seconds. Be ready.”

Then Hera was working at something by his feet. She tossed a boot up to him. One of his boots. “Kanan.” 

“Yes, Specter 2?” 

“I’m beating the stuffing out of your foot. You can’t feel that?”

He couldn’t feel anything except the pain in his neck and chest, and that numb, non-pain in his back. Like a tooth being ripped out of its socket. Like nerves being ripped off. He swallowed, sobered. “That’s a negative.”

She sat up, wiped an arm across her mouth. She was two shades paler than usual, and he wondered how he looked. “Love, I think—”

He wanted to spare her something. Spare her having to say it, at least. “Spine break. Yeah, I was putting that together.”

She leaned over him and he caught a glimpse of her efficient face, still doing what needed to be done, panic held at bay, if only barely. Then she bit his thumb. “OW! Hera, what the hell?”

She let out her breath, marginally. “Your hands still have feeling. Your armor must have done its job with your upper back. Still, a lower break.”

“Wait a minute, did you just bite my toe?”

“We had to be sure, and we didn’t have anything else sharp.”

The whole thing was so ridiculous, stuck flat on his back in an alley, the wreckage of their victory flung around them, Hera biting his toes like a spukama kitten. The absurdity of it welled up in him, and also the fear, and he started to laugh.

 Which only upset Hera more. “What are you doing?! Don’t move! Don’t MOVE! You’re going to make it worse.”

But he couldn’t stop laughing, stilted though his own voice sounded, not until she dropped her forehead to rest so carefully on his armor and he saw the deep breaths she was taking, too deep to be normal. He brought one hand up to cradle her head. “Hey. Hey. I’m all right.”

She looked at him then and he saw what was happening behind her eyes. Plans A, B, C, falling into place. What ifs for the next five years. She wasn’t crying, as he had thought. Just wearing a sick look that he’d never seen before. He repeated, “I’m okay,” and she sobbed (it was supposed to be a rebuke), “What about this is okay?” 

“Well,” he considered. “I haven’t had your mouth on my toes in months."

She did start crying then, just for a moment, as the Phantom’s engines hummed above them at last.  “You nerf.”

“Yeah.” He had to take an extra breath to get it out. It really hurt. “But you love me.”

Then he sucked in another breath and hit a sharp pain that was not in any way all right. The next breath barely got in. He saw her eyes startle, felt his own eyes fly open, gasping at the sky. Not enough breath left for jokes. “Hera. Left lung.”

Then Zeb figured out how to retract the wings a split second before he had the repulsors ready and the Phantom jerked and dropped over them and he closed his eyes to save the effort for breathing.

 

…

 

Everything was moving so slowly and Hera’s hands worked too fast. Zeb had to help strap Kanan to the board. “Chopper!” They ran the stretcher up the ramp. “We need you back here for a chest tube.” Her voice ripped her throat, pitched too high. She hoped she was intelligible.

The droid bleeped a protest and she responded “I don’t care what you’re doing! Get back here now!”

“You flying?” Zeb asked.

“No!” she waved him towards the pilot’s seat then pulled the release handle on the wall and let the big med kit thud onto the floor. Open it. No time to check his vitals for bad news she already knew. There was the disinfectant, right on top. A needle of anesthesia was also easy to find. Where was that tubing? Why did they make it clear, harder to see? And a knife. Her hands were shaking.

“Hera. Let Chopper do it,” Zeb cautioned from the front seat, taking off.

“Fly smooth!” she snapped back at him, but she handed the supplies—there was the tube at last!—to Chopper. “You know where? I’ll help find a place.” Cutting through the strap of his armor—he could be angry with her later. Cutting the difficult knit of his shirt. Bruising. Internal bleeding, so much. Of course there is. You don’t fall six stories and come out of it all right.

His lips were tinged with blue. He was still breathing. One thing at a time. Lung first. She put her ear to his left side, found a spot with a finger. Then she spared a glance for Chopper. “Are you okay to do this?”

An incredulous response. Hadn’t she figured out that he was a DROID?

“Still. Chop?”

For an answer, he blew steam onto the knife to sterilize it.

“Good boy.” She inserted the needle with the anesthetic deftly and swallowed her own moan of sympathy when the knife went in. “I’ve got the tube. Hold it open.” Please no nerves, please. At least they’d missed arteries. She wriggled the tube into his side, more difficult than it looked. Swigged the bottle of disinfectant and washed it around in her mouth. What was next? What had she forgotten?

“That’s poison,” Zeb cautioned.

She spit. “Not swallowing it.”

Then she bent to the tube, but Chopper bumped her legs so hard she took a step back. “You want to do this?” It was a long task, sucking out the extra air until they got him hooked up to the slightly better equipment of the Ghost. “Well, you probably won’t give him an infection. That’s fair.” She attached the tube to Chopper’s port and went looking for the next most critical area. A quiet hum as Chopper began to suck out the bubble of air that was pushing against Kanan’s lung. He wasn’t dead yet. He wasn’t dead yet. They had an oxygen mask on the Ghost.

Zeb sat the Phantom down next to the ship; the stretcher wouldn’t fit down the port ladder. Sabine met them at the ramp, worried and brassy. “I thought you were just going for groceries!” Then she got a good look at Kanan and just shut down. Hands helping keep him steady. No words.

“We’re hitting a real medical facility,” Hera told them as they transferred Kanan to the makeshift engineering-come-sickbay.  

“Can’t do that.” Oh good goddess, Kanan was conscious. Quiet, but there.

“No arguing.”

“See, you’re using your ‘no arguing’ tone,” he told the ceiling, “And that means you know the plan won’t work.”

Zeb took up the issue, “He’s right. They’ll be waiting for us, Hera. They’ll just kill him then.”

Sabine hadn’t said anything. She just sat on one end of the bench looking like a shriveled bug.

“Fine.” Hera paced the room, listening to her own boots. Thunk thunk thunk. Three paces across. Chopper wheeled an ellipse around her, distressed beeping demanding something she couldn’t decipher right now. Think. “…Then we’re going somewhere else.”

“Genius.”

“Zeb!”

“Sorry, Hera. Look—” Zeb cleared his throat. “I think know a place. Friends. Well, friends can get us in anyway. It’s a real med facility.”

She stopped. I’m listening.

“Top of the line medical facility. Just not Imperial. Farther along on the Rim, where the Imps aren’t supporting anything anyway. Strictly cash.”

“Hutt space, you mean.”  

“Can we do that?” Sabine asked quietly. She had learned what it meant to have no money to waste. She still hadn’t figured out exactly where on the poverty scale they were at any given time.

Hera brushed aside that smaller worry. “I’ve got a line of credit I can run. We can pay it back later with a big job. But I want to know more about this place. I’m sorry, Zeb, but this is Kanan we’re talking about. Back surgery and who knows what internal injuries—that’s tricky work.”

Kanan cleared his throat, or attempted to. “Anybody want to ask what I think?”

Silence. Hera was torn between the desire to have him rest painlessly and the fear that if he did so, he might not wake up. And here they were literally talking over him. She wrapped her fingers around his. His hand was cold, but he squeezed back.

“If Zeb vouches for it, it’s good enough for me. I’ve got a little set aside, Hera. Don’t worry about that.”

She tried not to let that sting.  “This is a team effort.”

“Anyway, do we have a choice?”

The Lasat imitated him, “’If Zeb vouches, it’s good enough for me. Besides, do we have a choice?’ You couldn’t have reversed those, buddy?”

Hera let out a long sigh. “Fine. You have the location I assume? Zeb? Do you need to radio ahead?”

“One appointment coming up.”

She turned her attention to Kanan. At least the bruising hadn’t gotten worse. He caught her eyes as she checked his vitals. His voice was so quiet. “Hera. You need to breathe and let go of it.”

She shook her head. Panic threatened and she pushed it back with thinned lips. He was partially right. She too needed to breathe against that pressure in her sides. Now was not the time to stop and give in. “Please. Just let me take care of you right now.”

“You always do.”  

 

…

 

The facility was clean. Furnishings weren’t new, but the equipment and the droids were well maintained. Hera got a good feeling from it.

At least she had, until they’d told her the chances. Many of his internal injuries had stabilized on their own—the medical droids had never seen anything like it. They would put the rib back and he would be no worse for the wear. As for the spine, the specialized surgeon droid gave them a seventy percent chance of success. Pretty good.

Thirty percent chance of failure, that voice in the back of her head kept saying. She usually took what useful information that pessimistic little voice offered and waved the rest of it away. But this was Kanan. She was stuck with it.

Two days. A long while to wait, jostled on a ship. She’d tried to keep him still, but there were certain things she and Zeb couldn’t do for him without moving him at least a little.  

Then a day of preparatory appointments. And now he was in surgery and they were sitting and waiting and doing more nothing.  Four hours in, she was good at pretending to read a datapad. It should only have taken three hours. Something had gone wrong.

 _Thirty percent_ , she told herself. _Get yourself ready for what this means_.

Kanan could still use the Force. He could fly a ship. There were good body suits available. Even if his spine couldn’t be repaired, they would make do. But what would it do to him over the next months and years? He’d kept in good spirits for the small amount of time he’d been awake, but she knew he hadn’t even considered what would happen if the surgery failed. Worry about that later, or not at all. He hated being helpless. He would pull away if he saw himself as a burden to them. What would it really do to him, to the man she knew?

Hera blinked. She’d cried it out last night, locked in the cockpit, a few steps further from the crew quarters that were just too close together these days. These few residual tears she put down to exhaustion. Easily dealt with.

Zeb had examined every stripe and picture on the wall a half dozen times before he took to bringing them pudding from the cafeteria. “Everything else looked questionable,” he said.

Sabine was sharp, incredulous. “And you thought the pudding looked okay?” She’d drawn into herself, nothing but a smart comment or a reassurance about how fine she was.

No. She’d offered to help, and Hera had sent her away, sure Kanan wouldn’t want her to see him like this.

The girl’s shoulders hadn’t been straight in three days. All that bravado was gone. She didn’t look like herself. Hera knew what it was—one family destroyed, running and hiding and finding a place to lick her wounds. Then even that bolt hole, that second, make-do family ripped away. And Kanan had always been her favorite. Hera wanted to reach out to her. To both of them. So she took Zeb’s pudding and told him (truthfully) that it wasn’t half bad. But Sabine—touch her and she’d twitch your hand away.

Hera looked down at the datapad again. Sabine was a problem without a solution. This, in front of her, was a problem with a solution, if only the charts would stop swimming. Zeb sat down to apply himself to the snack and Sabine took his place pacing. Hera dropped her forehead into one hand and rubbed her temples, swallowing hard past the pain in her throat. She was starting to get a cold. Couldn’t have that—she couldn’t give it to Kanan while he recuperated. She’d have to take care of herself and sleep sometime. Not tonight, of course. Maybe a few hours at some point tomorrow…

The touch on her shoulder surprised her. She followed the pink glove up the arm and met Sabine’s eyes. “Hera—” Her voice was stripped bare and Hera had one of those moments where she saw that this girl wasn’t so young, wasn’t so immature, wasn’t so fragile as her age might imply. Practically grown. Sabine took a deep breath and said (awkward, a little too forcefully) “Kanan’s going to be okay.” Then she waited, embarrassed.

 _I love you, bright girl_ , Hera thought. Aloud she said, “Sabine.” A tug. Sit next to me. Sabine dropped into the seat. “Kanan’s going to be okay.” The girl let her forehead sink onto Hera’s shoulder. At the crown of her head, Hera noted idly, the barest roots of natural black were growing in. The thin shoulders shook with no sound at all. She put her arms around Sabine and squeezed too tightly.

Zeb cleared his throat. “I’ll…uh… You look like you could use some tissues.” Hera nodded at him over Sabine’s head, not bothering to wipe the tears from her own face. He took two steps towards the courtesy station, then she heard him mutter “karabast,” and he was plunking into the seat next to her, wrapping huge arms around both of them, all the way around her and patting Sabine’s back. “It’s all right, little bit.”

Hera buried her face in Zeb’s arm, wiping her tears.  The smell of damp fur, like passing by the fresher door in the mornings. Zeb would stay. Sabine, too. The heart would remain, and they’d find a way to build up again from there. What she _wanted_ for them…she could let that go. Kanan would live. They could make this reality good enough.


	8. Four Years Post-Gorse

The bolt hit so close that Hera’s shoulder caught fire as they ran for the Ghost’s ramp, and Kanan tackled her, full contact, and put it out against the deck. Offered a hand and they were running again.

“Gun it, Chop!”

Sabine had monkeyed halfway up the ladder to the nose gun. “Next time I bring up the rear. You people are SLOW.”

“Old age,” Kanan replied, climbing.

“Maybe you can sit in one place and shoot things, you think?”

He called back from the gun turret. “Ma’am, yes ma’am. Who made her second in command?”

Hera slipped sideways through the cockpit door as soon as it started to open and took over from Chopper so he could calculate a jump. This was a clear get the heck to hyperspace situation if ever she’d seen one.

Sabine and Kanan were still going over the comms. “It’s a meritocracy,” Sabine was explaining. “That means—”

“—The mouthy ones get their way. We get it,” Zeb cut in.

Hera strapped in and eased back the lever. Under Chopper’s direction, the Ghost had been maintaining. Time to climb. The ship shook with the impact of a laser canon. According to the sensors, they’d picked up four friends—two in front, two behind. At least the shields were holding.

For now. “Sabine?”

All business. “On it.” The nose gun spat a bright line towards the approaching TIES, caught one.  Beautiful explosion. “Yeah!”

They climbed towards the glow of the atmosphere’s edge. Not there yet. No cloud cover today. “Wait a minute,” Hera told her. “Save me one of those fighters.”

“What?”

“Trust me.”

One ahead, two behind. Their canons pattered out a basic lattice formation. The Ghost was quick, responsive under her touch, too maneuverable for these amateurs to catch. Standard shooting, simple dodges. Now this was fun.

“Hera—” Zeb called from the aft gun. “It’s the perfect situation…”

“Garazeb.”

She wove an easy pattern around the shots.

“Come on, do it!”

“ _You_ could take out those two behind us any time.”

“Will you do it if I say pretty please and shoot two TIES for you?”

“I’d settle for one.”

“Right. Maybe I’ll get—HAH!” The muffled boom of the impact behind them, more a vibration than a sound. One blip disappeared from the sensors. “You owe me.”

Hera grinned. “Fine. Hold on!”

“Wait a minute—” “Hera—” “No, no no!” “Not in atmosphere!” Sabine and Kanan shouted over each other in protest.

She ignored them and tucked into a tight barrel roll.

“YEAH!” Zeb yelled.

“Sabine, now!”

“Somebody just made it extra challenging!” But Sabine was shooting as she spoke. The TIE in front of them exploded in a field of smoke and debris.

“Point blank too hard for you?” Kanan teased.

“Obviously not.”

They dodged behind the debris field. Up and over. The last TIE veered as well to avoid colliding with its demolished fellow, didn’t see that the Ghost had stopped running.

Was upending in a broad loop.  Hanging inverted directly above the TIE. Kanan’s turn, one unerring shot into the fighter below, and their shields shook off the impact of a thousand tiny exploding pieces. “We’re clear.”

Hera steered them up, into space proper, beyond the pale of the horizon. Clear sailing.

“Chopper, take us out.”

The stars stretched and they were safe.

Chopper gave a series of triumphant bleeps, dome spinning, then rolled off top-speed to force the others to congratulate his success.

That one had been close. “Any one you can walk away from…” Kanan joked into the comms. Zeb chuckled, but Sabine shot back, “You are all better. Nobody’s going to pretend your walking jokes are funny anymore.”

Hera took a deep breath, let it out, let go of some of the adrenaline. They hadn’t expected his physical therapy to be so…active. He said it was good exercise. That was Kanan, lately—Jaunty. Invincible.

In the cockpit doorway. “I need to talk to you.”

She hadn’t heard him come in. “Give me two minutes, love. I want to get the preliminary report ready, at least let Fulcrum know that we got the shipment.”

“No, not two minutes—now.” Something in his voice made her look up. Gone was the bantering tone of a moment ago, swept out by this uncharacteristic intensity. He mashed the door control with the side of a fist and they were in the cockpit alone.

“Okay. Now.” He was glowering, but she couldn’t imagine why he would be upset. “What is it?”

He nodded at her ruined shoulder pad. “You singed?”

She shook her head. “Are you hurt?”

“No. But I saw that blaster bolt hit three inches from your head. Too close.” He stabbed a finger in her face to punctuate the sentiment ( _How dare you come so close?_ that finger said) and she had to bite back a defensive retort _. Hey, it wasn’t_ my _fault_. But it _was_ her intel, so maybe it was her fault.

Instead, she just agreed. “Not one of our better moments.”

“I am not doing that again.”

“It’s not in the plan.”

“No, Hera. Not like that. You think I’m worried about the job being too dangerous?”

Of course not. He hadn’t lost his nerve, as so often happened after a serious injury. If anything, he seemed to take it as proof of his own invulnerability. Everyone else, though--he operated with a new awareness of the things that could happen to them. Jitters that he would work through, she thought. But this was something else.

“It’s not that,” he said again. “I’m not going out there with you and wondering what I could miss. I’m done with it. No more running, no more waiting.” Behind the anger (fear, really), she saw that old anguish in his eyes, given a new urgency. “What I want now is you.”

It was a declaration, plain and simple, for all of his yelling. She considered him for a moment. “All right.”

Prepared for more argument, he was caught with his mouth open. “All right? Just like that?”

No. She’d been waiting for the right moment for months. Then they hid in an alley and he decided to stay beside her instead of rushing into danger, he decided it _again_ , and he just smiled at her—not even realizing. And she’d thought, _Okay, that’s it. That’s your sign. Get back to the ship and kiss him crazy_.

Then everything had gone horribly wrong. And they’d grappled back to normal, and she’d waited, not wanting him to think that his injury caused her to bend out of pity. And now it was now. The realization rushed through her, a fast and powerful joy like twisting and watching that last TIE explode in a dogfight. Goodbye, obstacle. We win.

Out loud, she said, “Just like that. If you can realize that you are important—that you’re important to _me_ —you’ve got me.”

He caught her arm, hope and terror in his eyes. “We’re talking about the same thing, right?”

In answer, she wrapped her arms around his neck, raised up on her toes, and kissed him.

The kiss got out of hand quickly. She broke it to swallow back whatever fierce emotion threatened her with tears, started up the side of his neck ferociously, worked at his armor, then his shirt. Her gloves were on the floor. She needed skin against her hands, all the places she hadn’t been allowed to touch for so long because he’d been injured and it would hurt him. He pulled back to remove the shirt, caught a look at her face. “Hey, slow down. Are _you_ all right?”

So much better. A definitive “Yes,” and she leaned in to graze his ear with her teeth. She still knew all the places. His low groan. He stopped asking questions.

Her own clothing was not so easy. Clasps at front of the vest, snaps for the coveralls. Headphones off her ears and askew somewhere along the way. She wriggled half out of the flight suit—that was enough for her. Kanan gave an insistent tug at her shirt, then pulled it over her head when she obligingly raised her arms. It caught on her lekku and rather than waste time he left it there, a headdress. His hands were hungry, never grasping, palms smoothing downwards as she tugged at the base of his ponytail then speared fingers through his hair.

The chairs were too low. The starboard display afforded a nice spot, just enough room for Hera to perch on top of the panel. Kanan pushed her back against it and she hitched herself up, swirled her tongue against the pulse point in his neck. Smooth skin, steady heartbeat. Drumming a fast rhythm that echoed low, low in the pit of her stomach. She worked the buckle at the front of his pants, too tight. He was ready under her fingers. She stoked him higher.

Then his hand between her legs, searching expertly. She moved it away gently. “Not now.”

“What, then?” They were both breathing like they’d run a race. If she hesitated, he would wait. She had something else in mind. A bit further back on the panel, then she could wrap her legs around him, pull him in towards her. That beautiful moment of his teasing, bumping against her—but neither could hold back for long—and then he helped to brace her, one hand on her rear, and he slid in so smooth.

Their eyes locked. She knew her own face had flushed, watched his wet lips, the tense lines of desire around his mouth. The corners of his eyes smiled at her, even now. She wanted to take every part of him inside her. Her body clenched hard on him, _oh that, yes please_.

Then he tilted her hips, moved in, and it was a quick ride up to the top. Hera pushed her face into his neck and held on, every muscle tight.

It wasn’t the sex she’d missed. Occasionally, sure, but in those moments of despair when she’d asked herself _Why are you doing this?_ she’d been missing something else. Maybe his easy smile and the trust that came with it, maybe the laugh when she lost her patience (because she _could_ lose her patience, with him), maybe him moving a little closer on the bench to get comfortable. Maybe just being sure about him.

And it wasn’t the sex she needed now, not exactly. This was a pitched battle against anything outside of themselves, a way to turn those horrible feelings she’d buried away for months into something better. She needed some kind of emotional escape hatch. His arms held her tightly, his pace urgent. He needed the same thing. She braced an arm against the top of the panel and met him, far too aroused to be still.

There was an element of teasing in the angle. Both were rising, both needed more. Kanan lifted her heavily to the floor. The grating dug against her back as he pushed in—three times, four, so close. She could feel him ready inside her, and that finally pushed her over the edge, Kanan swollen and brushing against everything on the way in. She fell in a glorious tumble, nearly silent, but he must have been able to feel her body shudder around him. He followed a second later, buried deep, a ragged groan in the side of her neck to match her breath-pushed-out gasps.

They lay there for a moment, silent, eyes closed, bodies still trembling with periodic aftershocks. Then he mumbled, “Stupid, irresponsible teenage sex” against the side of her face, and it was so Kanan and so comfortable that she burst out laughing.

A shove to his shoulder. “I love you, but you’re crushing the air out of me,” and he rolled and brought her up with him, sitting. She felt the loss of him inside her, arched and stretched cramped muscles, bodies sweating against each other. His fingers found the marks on her back from the floor. “Are you all right?”

“ _Oh_ yes. You?” She examined the indentations on his hands, kissed one, rolled a finger into her mouth. That earned her another groan.

“Up and up?” he asked lightly, and she laughed.

“I think we’d better _clean_ up.” His semen was a warm line high inside her thigh. One of the forbidden pleasures of adulthood. Stupid teenage sex indeed, but she had a package of contraceptive strips in her room that would keep them covered for a month.

A month of this. She shivered in anticipation. Kanan was dropping teasing little kisses along the side of her neck. Maybe they had time…

“You hit the fresher first, I’ll man the sensors,” he said.

She bit back desire, pulled responsibility to the forefront. “Right.”

Her skin was cool from their sweat as she pulled her clothes back on, tugged them into some semblance of order. He finished dressing first and watched her.

“Hera…”

She looked up at him. _Yes?_

“When I say I want all of you, all the time, you know this is only a small piece of it…”

A question, despite the tone.

She leaned in and hugged him, rubbed her nose in the center of his shirt. It smelled strongly of him. That spark in the pit of her stomach again, but stronger the tight feeling in her chest. “I know.” A kiss to his jaw. “I know.”

They held hands until she pulled away, heading for the door. He squeezed her hand just before she left.

 

…

 

Sabine and Zeb both sat at the dejarik table, hunched over bowls of cereal and milk, Zeb slurping his down, Sabine nursing hers. The sight reminded Hera that she was desperately thirsty. A detour to the galley and a glass of water, gulped on her way back across the common room. She really ought to hurry with the fresher; Kanan was waiting his turn.

“Thirsty?” Zeb asked lightly. Something in the sight of them silently eating caught her attention. What was it? Sabine’s eyes were fixed on her bowl.

They weren't looking at her. But they were both watching her.

She didn’t realize that she, on the other hand, was staring until Zeb remarked to Sabine, “Hera thinks you should be eating in the galley. She likes things to happen in their proper rooms.” This last with a definite smirk at her. Oh, crap. He could smell her.

Sabine made some kind of choked sound in the direction of the bowl. What was that? Hera met Zeb’s eyes, questioning, and he responded with a motion of the forefinger—the toggling of a switch.

Oh, kriff. Oh, _kriff_.

She mashed the button for internal comms. “…Kanan?”

The definite static buzz of a comm turning off, on his end. When he reactivated it a moment later they caught him in the middle of a prolific cursing streak. Both Sabine and Zeb dropped their heads, shaking, trying not to laugh. Hera dropped her head to her hand for entirely different reasons. The comm— The cockpit toggle attached to the starboard panel— When exactly had they bumped it?

The line was still open. She had commed him. She really ought to think of something to say, some cover. On the other end, Kanan too was silent, trying to think of something innocuous. Finally he settled on, “Hera? Is there something I can do for you?”

Zeb and Sabine lost what little control remained, howling with laughter. Cereal jettisoned from Sabine’s mouth. Zeb clapped her shoulder too hard. “Hey!”

“Hey!” Hera echoed. “The table!” Right, concentrate on the small things like that.

“What’s the matter?” Zeb asked. “Did we get it too messy?”

“Oh, come on. That’s a stretch.”

But Sabine was egging him on, gasping through laughter. “That’s what _she_ —”

“Sabine!”

Hera shook her head in feigned disgust to cover her burning cheeks. Time to retreat to the fresher.

She was already perfecting the arched-eyebrow look that would _dare_ them to mention it later when she remembered—they really liked dares.

 

…

 

When she returned to her bunk to change, the light on the comm panel was blinking. Karabast! She’d never sent the report. Fulcrum would be wondering…

She typed a quick message, uploaded the information— _all is well_ —and hit send immediately. Two minutes later the light blinked for incoming again, catching her with a pants leg half off, boot still on. Where was that shirt? She hopped around the room for the quickest of quick changes, then hit the comm and hoped that Fulcrum was still live on the other end.

“Specter 2,” the scrambled voice came through.

“Fulcrum. Did you get the information?”

“Yes. Excellent work on the intercepted cargo, as usual. Did you run into any trouble?”

“A little. The Imperial presence was heavier than we expected,” Hera admitted. She did not say _heavier than we were lead to expect_. Fulcrum had never misled them. This type of information was by its nature unreliable and shifting.

“Were you delayed? We worried.”

Ouch. She wasn’t used to someone else playing the chastising parent. Though to be fair, she should have sent the message. Two minutes—that’s all it would have taken. “We _were_ delayed,” she said, wincing at the redundancy, the give-away throat clear she failed to suppress at the end.

“Your crew is safe?”

“Yes, all well.”

“And the assignments are meeting your expectations for difficulty?” Hera wondered if Fulcrum was concerned for the safety of the crew or questioning their ability to complete the missions.

“We’re all full fighting strength again,” she assured their contact. “Ready to take on whatever you’ve got.” _Within reason_ , she added silently.

“Glad to hear that. The Imperial presence is expanding. So many areas on the Outer Rim are fully occupied now. No more token security. We—I—need the help.”

Hera swallowed down guilt. They had been running at half speed for the past two months, nursing their wounds, taking care of Kanan. They’d pulled small-scale, routine ops, but she wouldn’t involve him in a mission before he was ready. And now he _was_ ready—hadn’t missed a beat—but had they been needed, in the interim? Should she have taken more assignments herself? Had she been indulging in playing mama bird to him?

They’d worked, just not enough. And that was another thing. An awkward issue to broach. “As a matter of fact, Fulcrum, if you _have_ other jobs… We should probably increase our case load, anyway.” There, that was diplomatic. “Particularly jobs with high payouts.” That was more pointed, but she wouldn’t owe money in Hutt Space.

A pause on the other end. “I thought you might say that. We have an operation that will suit your crew’s particular skills. Transmitting data.”  
  
Hera skimmed the parameters of the mission, leaving the line open. A munitions factory.

“Excellent payout. If your people can make it past security.”

One potential problem. “That would require getting someone on the roof with virtually no noise. Not even a rocket pack.”

“Well within your Specter 1’s skill set,” Fulcrum replied.

A thought flickered to life in her head, an absurd, paranoid suspicion. Did Fulcrum know about Kanan? Was she feeling him out, trying to see what impossible things he could do? Hera herself had always been circumspect, careful with his secrets. Not careful enough, obviously. Some of his unbelievable stunts must have come through in her reports.

“Maybe…” She tried to sound doubtful. “If not, we could get Specter 5 up there, I’m sure. She’s like a monong.”

Was Fulcrum really testing him?

Was she being paranoid?

She trusted Fulcrum anyway, not just the kind of confidence given to those underworld contacts whose limits were known. But certain things needed to remain secret in order to protect people. This was one of those things.  

“Specter 2—” Fulcrum was trying to get her attention. “What’s your answer?”

Too pretty a grab to pass up. “We’ll take it. I’ll wait for the rest of your transmission, and you’ll have my full report on today within the next few hours.”

Kanan could toss Sabine up to the roof and nobody would be the wiser. Easier for the girl to chisel out the hatch with one of her acid mixtures, anyway. _You need to be more careful with your people_ , she reminded herself. Once something was known, it couldn’t be taken back. Secrecy was safety.

Then the comm for Zeb’s room lit up and their crewmate treated them all to a long string of burping the letters of the aurebesh. Hera’s future unfolded before her, a series of never-ending pranks involving poor usage of the internal comms.

Another indicator light and Kanan’s voice broke in. “Garazeb, I will _end_ you.”

“Kanan? Are the comms on? How embarrassing.”

All right. Enough worrying. This, apparently, was the good life.      


	9. Six Years Post-Gorse

He actually got in the crate.

She had feared for a moment that he wouldn’t, that he would do something crazy instead. So when the magnetic lock latched on and the crate rose through the bay doors, she let herself feel something like relief.

Then the comm buzzed and Zeb cut into that fantasy. “Uh, Hera, he’s not staying in the hold. Hera, can you hear me? He’s doing something crazy.”

“What’s he doing, Zeb?”

“Fly real steady, okay?”

And then she saw Kanan, climbing out on top of the docking ring. WHAT was he doing? He wasn’t even perched in the most stable spot—off to the side, so that he wouldn’t obscure her vision.

The static of his comm activating. “Hera, fly up.”

“Are you crazy?”

“The kid’s up there. Just trust me. I’ll be all right; I promise.” 

“Are. You. Crazy?”

“Hera.”

 _Trust me_. All right. She took the Ghost straight up, in position to grab Ezra and the little one. Kanan on the port ring. Not falling to his death. Doing fine. Hold steady, so steady. Come on, hands.

Then a blue glow in front of him, obscured by his body. She knew instantly what it was. The adrenaline of a tight situation curled in her chest, locked onto her heart, became a much more serious fear.

_Now they all know._

_No_. But some part of her mind accepted it, even as she tried to find a way out. This was the beginning of that downhill race with the bad finish. This kept him running and drinking and brawling, terrified, for all those years.

This was the actual most dangerous thing that had ever happened to them.  

The ISB agent fired. Knees bent, Kanan parried the shots easily, and now Hera saw the blue blade in earnest.

She’d seen him balance in plenty of crazy places, but never a ship in flight. She’d seen him snap on the saber here and there, but never deflect an enemy barrage. And there he was, standing in profile, knees and hips rolling as the Ghost hefted, shoulder moving so smooth, almost thoughtless.

A very different kind of rush shot past the terror in her chest and pooled lower, in the pit of her stomach, then lower. More powerful than fear. Bodies in motion. He was beautiful.

Then Kanan was shouting “Jump, kid!” and he performed one of those impossible catches. Yelling over the comm at her to go go go, and it was her job, always, to punch it, get us out of here.

Escape was the easy part, for now. Later, when Lothal’s sun went down and Ezra had made his decision, they were all stuck with each other and with today’s truths. No mission to distract them.

Down the ladder in the hold, Kanan was telling Ezra something, that serious, genuine tone he used more and more often lately. Laying down ground rules, most likely. She shut the cockpit hatch and gave them some space. When he walked Ezra up a few minutes later, he was telling the boy, “I’m in charge of your missions, but Hera’s in charge of the ship. So…really…Hera’s in charge.” His body language had changed. Stern and responsible. He looked like he needed a break.

Hera took pity on him. “Come on, Ezra, I’ll get you settled.” To Kanan, “You take off and give us some time, okay?” Ezra shifted from foot to foot. Too much instruction after a lifetime of running on his own, maybe, but he didn’t object.

She walked him back through the crew quarters. “This is Kanan’s room. You’ve seen that already.”

Ezra had the good grace to look sheepish, at least. Good. He had proven himself to be clever and skillful—she’d never seen a child so young wriggle his way out of so many tight spots—but they were risking so much for him. She thought of the blue arc of a saber. Well, Kanan was risking so much for him. He’d better have a good heart, too.

Then again… Hera thought of the little one who had left the ship with his father only a few hours earlier. She gave it a better than even chance that underneath that smart mouth, Ezra was actually sweet.

“And this is your room.”

Zeb sat up in time to catch what she said and bumped his head on the bunk above. “WHAT? Over my dead body.”

“That can be arranged,” Ezra volleyed over her shoulder. “Couldn’t smell any worse.”

“Hera, you don’t expect me to put up with—”

“Hera, I’ll just sleep somewhere else. Anywhere else.”

The hold was full of a shifting assortment of junk, loud from the constant purr of engines. The common areas were likely to be occupied at any given hour of the day or night. “There isn’t anywhere else.”

“Put him on the hull.”

“Zeb, that is not helpful. Do you have any real suggestions? Maybe with Sabine?” She gave him the raised eyebrow. Even out of the corner of her eye, she could see Ezra turn beet red, but the line wasn’t meant for him.

Large yellow eyes. Lasats were very good at rolling them, she’d found. Based upon anecdotal evidence, of course. Zeb crossed his arms, battle pose. “Yeah, I’ve got a suggestion. What about Kanan’s room?”

“You know he uses that space to meditate. You don’t.”

“Wasn’t talking about _Ezra_ and Kanan sharing a bunk.”   

“Discretion,” she cautioned.

“Who is this lecturing me about discretion?” 

“Garazeb!” 

Ezra was two steps outside of the door, ready to bolt if he pushed Zeb too far. He pointed an accusatory finger across the room. “Do you snore?” 

“Why, do you?”

“Don’t mind Zeb, Ezra.” She took his arm, drew him gently—insistently—back into the room. “He’s actually a good guy. Kind of coarse, but a good guy. This bunk sleeps two.” A pointed look at Zeb. “ _My_ bunk sleeps one. And it’s got the equipment for coded transmissions. You’ll both be unconscious most of the time you’re in here, anyway.” 

“He will be,” Zeb muttered.

“Garazeb.” She shot him her most threatening look and was gratified to see him back down. Not cowed, maybe, but at least appeasing her.

“Aye, Captain Tyrant. But this is me registering a formal complaint.”

“Come on, Ezra. We’ll get you some sheets.”

“Do you have any noseplugs, too?”

“Hey!” Zeb started towards him and Ezra ducked back behind her.

“You know, you’re not exactly endearing yourself,” she told him over her shoulder, hustling him out of the room before any actual head-bashing could take place.

“I’m an acquired taste.”

“I’m sure it takes a refined palate.”

“Huh?”

“She means you’re about as pleasant as bantha dung!” Zeb shouted through the door.

“Let it go!” Hera called back, ushering Ezra ahead of her through the common room. Hopefully they’d both be too exhausted to keep the rivalry going past bedtime. Hopefully.

“Here’s the fresher. It’s always a bit of a mess, sorry. But if you look around…” She opened the large cabinet, rummaged past hair care products that had multiplied like Felucian bunnies in the past few years, and, miracle of miracles, found a towel that was not only clean but actually free of dye stains. “Aha! Here, this can be yours. Don’t let Sabine get it.” The towel landed on Ezra’s head. He removed it sheepishly and hung it over his shoulder, taking what he probably thought was a surreptitious sniff in the process. Clean laundry. Did every species in the galaxy love the smell? 

“Uhm, thanks.” 

She braved the cabinet again and came up with an old sheet. “And help yourself to the galley.” 

This time he mumbled the “thanks.” He was embarrassed, unwilling to make wisecracks with her and unsure of what else to say.  One of those teenage boy things. He folded his towel sloppily, spoke at his hands. “I’m, uh, not really hungry right now.”

Hera had to scrutinize that look for a minute before she figured it out. This wasn’t an awkward teenager problem. He just didn’t know how to react to being given all of these things. He pushed his hair out of his face and it fell immediately back where it started. Hera’s heart broke for the millionth time. _It’s just a towel, kid._

“Maybe I’ll go…check out the hold instead,” he shrugged.

The hold? Oh, Zeb was occupying the bunk. “That’s fine. Of course, you can use the holonet in the common room if you want, too.”

“Yeah, that sounds good.”

She made a mental note to talk to Zeb about staying calm in the face of aggravation. “Through there.”

“I know.” He waved at her and took off. Back over his shoulder: “And, uh, thanks. Really, thanks. For everything.”

“Don’t mention it. You did great today.”

If the situation was a big adjustment for them, how must Ezra feel?

Hera went back to the cockpit to check the sensors one more time before she turned in, and found Sabine sitting in her chair. She grabbed the back, swiveled it around. “Excuse me.” _Up._  

“How could you do this to me?!” Sabine greeted her.

“Do what? That’s _my_ chair.”

“I already go out there and get shot at like every day, Hera. I don’t need to fend off attacks in my own home!”

“Oh, you mean Ezra?” 

“Yes, I mean the kid. He’s intolerable.” 

“Sabine.”

“He hits on me _every_ time he sees me.”

“Sabine.”

“Seriously, I’m always looking over my shoulder for a sneak attack.” 

“Sabine.” 

“What?”

“Do you actually think he’s dangerous, or just annoying?”

The girl sighed. “Definitely just annoying.”

“And is it ruining your life, or is it annoying?”

“Annoying,” she muttered.

“Then think about how we felt when you came aboard.”

“Hey! That is hardly—”

“—the same thing, no. But you weren’t exactly a joyful and serene presence on the ship. We put up with you and took care of you for a long time, in a lot of ways you probably don’t even realize.”

“I hope you’re not suggesting that I put up with his constant flirting.”

“No, put him in his place. If it really bothers you, tell me and _I’ll_ put him in his place. But…you’re tough now.”

Sabine rolled her eyes.

“I mean it. You’re not fragile. Ezra has nothing—no family, no reason to let his guard down. We’re going to have to go easy on him for a while. Or at least accept that he’s a good person despite lacking a little polish.”

Sabine sighed heavily, sensing that she’d lost her case. “And I’m just going to have to—”

“—suck it up, sunblossom,” they said, together.

Hera smiled. “Sorry, kid,” she said, genuinely meaning it. “I know how infuriating that kind of attention can be. But he’ll learn, and he’ll stop. Soon, I’d bet. He’s smart.”

A huff.

“And in the meantime, I might overlook a little physical violence. _If_ it’s provoked.”

“I still don’t like it.”

“Opinion duly noted.”

“You don’t really care, do you?”

“If you feel like complaining, you know where to find me. But it’s not going to change anything.”

“Great. Guess I’ll go drown my troubles in artistic research, then. Zeb’s not on the net in the common room, is he?”

“Oh. Ezra’s already using it.”

“What? How is that fair?”

A look.

“Fine, fine,” Sabine grumbled. “Maybe I can turn this to my advantage and kick him off of it without much of a fight.”

“Play nice.”

The girl saluted her response and left.

Hera checked the sensors before she looked at the chronometer. That last one shocked her. Almost tomorrow, already, and they were treating it like late afternoon. Had they even bothered with dinner? All evening she’d fielded a steady stream of issues, logistical and psychological. The only person who hadn’t come to her with a complaint was Kanan. And he had had… one of the longer days of their acquaintance. No sounds of tinkering in the hold, no smells of cooking drifting through the vents from the galley.

She tracked him down in his bunk. He was sitting in that cross-legged position she seldom saw, spine straight, eyes closed. Meditating. She shouldn’t have interrupted.

“It’s not really working,” he told her. Then he opened his eyes, and with that gaze returned everything—fear and frustration and failure. “You can come in.”

“You want to talk about it?”

He let out a breath so hard he must have been holding it. “What’s to talk about? I just promised that kid I’d turn him into a Jedi, and then ruined his life.”

“You’re going to have to slow down, love. I didn’t follow you through that leap.”

“I can’t train him to be a Jedi, Hera. I can’t even train myself, because I’m NOT a Jedi!”

“I see. Well.” How to show him what she saw, really? “Today a man stood on top of my ship and batted blaster bolts away like they were whiffles. If that’s not a Jedi, I don’t know what is.”

“Hera, that’s just one moment of showy—”

“AND,” she continued, “no matter what you do, you can help him a lot more than you could if we just left him alone on Lothal. He has nothing there. You know what that’s like.”  

He was pacing now. Had started in the middle of her encouragement. “See, that’s just it. Say I train him to be ten times better than he is now. They’re going to send a thousand more troops after him than they were before. They’re coming after us, Hera.”

She couldn’t argue with that one. Truthfully, though, Ezra might get away unnoticed. It was Kanan she worried about.

“That’s the problem with being planet-side so much,” he was muttering, “You get these delusions of grandeur in the daylight, and then you realize what an idiot you were at night, when it’s too late to take it back."

“Kanan—” she sighed. He was so confident, even cocky, when they ran a mission. Most of the time, in fact. Then he got into these moods where he was sure his skills were no match for the world, and he, personally, was going to get everyone killed. And there was no talking him out of it. You just had to derail him. “—Come here,” she settled. 

“I can’t send him back to Lothal. Not after I asked him to trust me.” He looked up at her. “Can I?” 

“Come _here_ ,” she repeated. “You’ve got to stop thinking.” 

He did come closer, wrapping his arms around her waist, but he kept worrying. “Tell me what _you_ think, then. I need some feedback, Hera, because I’m just going around and around on this one.” 

“I think that you know some of what you need, and that we’ll figure out the rest as we go. You don’t have to have all the answers right now.”

He let out his breath in a dissatisfied huff.

“And I _think—_ ” Hera went up on her toes, putting him at eye-level, “That you need to stop _thinking_.” She leaned in, kissed his cheek, then went for his ear instead of his lips. Aggressive. She drew the lobe into her mouth and mumbled wetly, “Stop going around in circles.” Her tongue traced the whirl of his ear in demonstration.

Kanan let out a breath that was almost a groan. “I’m onto your scheme,” he told her, but his voice was heavy.

“Mmm hmm, well, I’m fairly transparent.” She ran her nails lightly down his chest, dragging through the coarse hair that started there and then poured itself lower.

“You really think I should let this one go?”

“At least leave it for now.” Lower still, working at the clasps of his pants.

“Hera, it’s okay. You don’t have to—”

“Hush,” she told him, flicking his hipbone imperiously with her finger. _I never_ have _to. That’s not why we do this._ All of these words had been said before _. I enjoy taking care of you sometimes. I enjoy your body._ By this point in their relationship he believed her, so instead of protesting he helped her with his clothing. Hera pushed him down onto the bed, sitting, and followed the trail her hands had made with her lips. Down to the floor, just in front of him. No mistaking what was going to happen here.

She nuzzled his stomach on her way down, but the muscles were already tense and gorgeously outlined—no give there. So she dipped her tongue into his navel instead. His breath caught. His hands ran lightly down tchin and tchun, not gripping, not coercing her anywhere.

Hera hummed her approval against his thigh, then guided him into her mouth.

She didn’t have much work left to do, drawing the blood downwards. In the first teasing moments, as tongue and lips caressed those veins lightly, she had room to watch his reaction. The worry he habitually showed in that straight line between his brows smoothed out. His eyes closed. His throat moved. “Hera.” Her name was a word of relief, not an entreaty for more.

Then gradually, as those kisses deepened, the lines of tension on his face returned. And she got to watch all of it, his cheeks his mouth his eyes taut and concentrating, beatified by his desire.

Kanan still thought she did this mostly for him.

His hips twitched. He never let himself thrust. She caught the first small taste of his pleasure. He did grip tchun then, lightly, his touch mirroring what he wanted. Always more gentle with her, though, as if any frustration stopped at his hands and he kept those reserved to tend to her. She spared another glance up and caught his hooded eyes. He watched her savor that taste. _Yes, love. I know you’re looking. Here, wouldn’t you like to see this?_

Things picked up quickly from there and she moved in, made certain she kept pace. Her own arousal built, a racing heart and a buzz throughout her body, rather than the usual specific ache. Kanan had never been a noisy lover—convenient, since they could practically hear each other breathe through the walls of the crew quarters. Now he stifled his gasps and the sound shook her body, too.

Hera didn’t know what it was like to sense another person through the Force. Connected so intimately, though, watching him find his way higher and then still higher, she couldn’t imagine it felt much different than this. Finally she could fly him no further this way, and this time his rough voice _was_ a plea—“Hera.”

She added well-placed fingers and finished him, waited for those shivers to stop, his breathing to begin to quiet. She waited for him to tug the corner of the sheet and clean them both. Then he pulled her up to curl with him on the bed. She was bright eyed and breathing heavily, herself. He squeezed her against his side. She blew on his chest to cool the beads of sweat that glistened there. “Hera, can I?”

She shook her head. “I’m all right for now. I want you relaxing.”

“Oh, you want me?” He grinned at her, muscles in his face mostly open, and she grinned back. Small steps. Tomorrow we can talk about Ezra again, in the daylight. She traced patterns on his chest with a finger. He had no objections. “Still good?”

A long pause. “Actually, I was wondering—”

“What?”

“When you were younger, did you learn…” she struggled for the proper word, “forms?”

“Forms?”

“Like fencers do. I know it would be different, but…”

“Oh, you mean lightsaber forms?”

“Yes.”

She could feel him roll his eyes. “So many forms. So much drilling!”

That image still stood in her mind, Kanan impossibly balanced, swinging the glowing saber through smooth arcs that reversed just as smoothly. She didn’t want to hit the wrong note. “Do you think you could show me one?”

He watched her face for a moment, eyes dark in the shadow of the bunk. Then a slow smile spread over his face as he caught her line of thinking. “You want to watch me.”

A half grin back at him.

“All right.” He rose, drew a deep breath, took his lightsaber from the drawer under the bed. Reached for his pants.

“Maybe not those,” Hera suggested.

Kanan shook his head, that lopsided grin still in place. Was it her imagination in the faint light, or had his face turned pink? He snapped on the lightsaber. A sound like a pneumatic piston, followed by a steady hum. Then he took a neutral stance and centered himself. Any bashfulness faded from his face, leaving only calm and concentration. He was in a different space now, certainly not thinking of her presence. She was just lucky enough to witness.

And then he moved—low block, swing, and on in an endless wave of changing shapes, muscles bunching together then elongating, always fluid. Bodies in motion.

They needed a plan, it was true. They would meet stronger opposition now, maybe even be hunted. _They’re coming after us_ , Kanan’s voice echoed in her head. She had nothing beyond the safety measures they always took.

Kanan powered the saber off. The glow of its light abruptly left the room. The slide of a drawer opening as he put it away, then the weight of his body sinking onto the bed next to her. “Can you stay?”

“Chopper’s keeping watch for a while. We’re all exhausted.”

“Didn’t sound like anyone was turning in.”

“Still.”

He planted a sleepy kiss on her shoulder, but now Hera’s brain wouldn’t shut off. Ezra’s presence—or at least the events he had started—changed everything. Kanan wielding a lightsaber, talking about the Jedi. The ISB agent calling them out, recording them, “A master and a padawan.” (“What’s a padawan?” Ezra had asked, and Kanan turned towards him sharply. “Where did you hear that?”). What would happen now?

Kanan snaked an arm around her middle without opening his eyes, mumbled against her back, “Now you’re doing it.”

“Hmm? No.” She forced herself to take a long breath and let it out slowly. Let it go. Laced her hand with his, shifted her head on the pillow, getting comfortable. Closed her eyes.

Tomorrow. They would worry about this tomorrow.


	10. Six Years, Two Months Post-Gorse

Kanan watched Hera pour two-thirds of the bag of frozen vegetables into the pot, glance around at their crew—now five eating members—and pour in the rest of the bag, mouth tightening into a grim line. He made a mental note: _Paying job. Now._

“Flatbread rolls again?” Sabine groaned, peering at what had already made its way out of the conservator.

Hera called over her shoulder, “It’s leftovers night. You can find something you want.”

If he was honest, things had gotten steadily better over the years. Vizago wasn’t a bad source of income. Some of his jobs fell into a morally gray area, but it was nice to have a backup option for some quick cash. And Fulcrum—as far as he could tell, Fulcrum was steady and reliable. As much work as they wanted. But they hadn’t gotten paid for those disruptors they blew up, and credits for the droids aside, they hadn’t been in a spot this rough in a while.

Hera didn’t usually cook, but when supplies were low she took the helm so that nobody got worried. It wasn’t hard to disguise economy as bad cooking.

And here was Ezra, squeezing into the tiny galley with the rest of them, wiping grease-stained hands on his pants. Kanan opened his mouth, but Hera beat him to it. “Wash your hands, Ezra.”

“This towel smells!”

He was continually amazed by how little Ezra resembled any padawan he’d known in the Temple. Curiosity? Check. Eagerness? Check. Respect? Let’s just say he was not shy in sharing his own opinions about everything. Everything. Even towels. “No, it doesn’t. I just watched it come out of the laundry.”

“No, really, it smells. Here, Sabine, see?” Ezra tossed the towel her way.

“Eew, I don’t want it! It probably smells like your boy sweat; that doesn’t wash out.”

“It probably smells like something else,” Zeb sniggered.

Chopper chortled.

“Snips and snails and rycrit tails,” Hera put in sweetly, warning.

“That’s not what he said.”

Kanan frowned. Since Ezra’s arrival, the dialogue on the ship had taken a turn for the juvenile. And it hadn’t been all that elevated, before. To be fair, Ezra wasn’t even the one dishing it out—it always started with Sabine or Zeb or Chopper teasing him.

Granted, Ezra gave as good as he got.

“Something productive, not disgusting,” Kanan cautioned.

Sabine opened her mouth gleefully with a retort for that one, then shut it when she caught his eye. He had been growling at everyone lately, he knew it. But they wouldn’t turn off the banter for five seconds, and Hera needed a break. (Hera was fine, he admitted to himself reluctantly and very privately. _He_ needed a break.)

“Why don’t you see what else is hiding in the back of the conservator and set the table?” he suggested.

“Gotta be better than space-carrot flatbreads,” Ezra muttered.

This time Hera shot him the eye. “Watch it.”

Kanan brushed a hand lightly against her back, the most casual of touches. Her body language was off—spine straighter, turns less fluid than usual. Small aches and pains, he supposed. Or maybe she was still spooked. “You okay?”

She answered without looking up. “Yeah. Fine.” This body language he knew. It meant _Please change the subject_. It really meant _Please stop talking before somebody asks us what we’re talking about._

Nothing was wrong. Nothing ever had been wrong. Still, he kept reliving that night a tense week ago, Hera’s face watching his, terrified to know. “Just a scare,” she had told him. “I’m sure it’s nothing. But…can you check?”

She didn’t scare easily. She had been sitting on this alone for two weeks, already.

The warmth of her abdomen under his cooler hand, her eyes fixed to his face while he searched for…he didn’t know what. _She_ was alive. He could always feel her through the Force when he touched her, bright and warm. But it wasn’t like he could differentiate individual cells. Some Jedi back at the Temple could do that type of precision work, but… it was far beyond what he would ever approach.

“I don’t sense _anything_ ,” he had said, hearing the frustration in his own voice. Bite that back, Kanan. She’s got enough on her plate as it is. “But I don’t think I would be able to tell at this point, anyway. It’s like looking for one star in a nebula.”  
  
She had relaxed, marginally. No news was good news. “Surely it’s fine. We’ve been so careful. And I don’t even know if we _can_ …” Humans and Twi’leks. It was a slim chance, to begin with.

Which meant, of course, that they would beat the odds. “I’ve never found that the galaxy cares much about what we’ve got planned, have you?” Out of his mouth, the phrase had sounded flippant. He’d meant it very seriously. 

But she had barely heard. She was still running on damage control mode, searching for words, he saw, that wouldn’t offend him. Trying to say something difficult the right way. Finally, she’d settled on, “Do you want to tell me what the Force has to do with this kind of thing?”

“No. No, that’s not… I don’t even think that’s... Surely not. No.” If the Force had that kind of power, surely he would have encountered this situation before. That is, if he’d stuck around long enough to encounter it. A sinking weight in his stomach. What if the Jedi code of “no attachments” held a more practical purpose than he knew?

No. If that was the case, it wouldn’t have taken them four years to get to this point.

What would they do? What would she want to do, that was the real question. Well as he knew Hera, he’d found that he didn’t know the answer. Everything was already so crazy, worse than ever in some ways. And then on the other hand, they had finally learned not to pass up opportunities for happiness. What was he supposed to want? More immediately, what was he supposed to _say_?

Hera had said: “We can’t do this right now, we just can’t.” Well, there it was. An answering pang in his throat. Was that disappointment?

She must have seen it. She said he hid his feelings about as well as a Kushiban. “Kanan. You know we can’t do this, right?”

He had kept his tone carefully neutral. “We might be able to figure something out. Never heard you say ‘can’t’ before.”

She’d blown out a frustrated breath. “We’re already drawing fire every time we step off the ship. If I could keep us any safer, I would have done it already. You want to bring a tiny, helpless baby into this?”

 _A tiny, helpless, baby whose father is a known Jedi_ , she hadn’t said. But she must have been thinking it. Into a galaxy where Force sensitives were hunted and systematically destroyed. An easy mark for that Inquisitor, whatever he was. An image had passed behind his eyes for just a moment, like something out of a primal nightmare—the thin gray face behind a spinning red blade, walking through the halls of the Ghost, his home.

Hera had watched him, waiting for a response. So far, he hadn’t done great. _She’s right_ , he thought. _She’s right, but that’s not the whole story. You need to talk. Put her at ease. Be incorrigible_. “I don’t know…you got any great names you’ve been saving for an occasion like this?”

“Kanan.” But her shoulders had untensed, some of that fear leaving her at last.

“Sorry, Hera. Look. I love you. And I don’t think either of us is planning on jumping ship.” _Ever_. “But I hadn’t thought about whether this is something…I’d want. Much less how you felt about it. I just assumed we wouldn’t… No, that’s not even true. I just never thought about it.”

She’d had that eyebrow raised. “You certainly seemed like you thought about it when we ran low on contraception and you wouldn’t…”

He had cut her off, embarrassed. “That’s not the same. You never think it will really happen. But…” He wasn’t as good with words as she was. He was going to say the wrong thing without even realizing it. “Look, I need to think this through. But as of right now, I think any baby of ours would be pretty amazing. Whether that’s now, or down the road, or…” She had smiled at him, a half-embarrassed smile, her cheeks a little darker, but she hadn’t lost her skeptical look. “…or not at all, that’s something we should maybe talk about for real.”

She had shaken her head. “That’s a short conversation.” She must have seen something in his face; her own face had softened. Those sympathetic eyes he knew so well. “Maybe some day, love. But I don’t see how it could possibly work right now. Or…any time in the foreseeable future, really. I hadn’t…planned in that direction.”

Neither had he. They’d been kind of busy. Although, thinking back, he should really have known something was up. Hera schooled herself into the appearance of calm, talked herself into patience, but the signs of stress were still there. He thought she’d been worried about this Inquisitor. Really, she’d been shouldering one more worry, shielding him again. “Hera—” She had a tendency to do that. He had a tendency to need to know what was going on. “I know this is your call. Just…don’t go solo on this one, okay? Talk to me. Let me be there. Let me help.”

And she’d promised. He had gone on to monitor sensors and comms for his shift, come back to her later after she had long been asleep, careful not to wake her. Lying awake in the dark, Hera stretched out warm next to him, Kanan had let himself have one night of crazy, private hope, knowing how foolish it was, knowing he would have to look at it differently in the morning.

Then yesterday, she’d pulled him into the engineering bay and told him it was fine, her whole body speaking her relief. Just a scare.

“Vegetables are done. Colander’s by your feet.” And so succinctly, she called him back to the present moment.

He let out a long breath, but knelt for the colander. Hera was all right. He was off center. And he didn’t want a kid either—well, not really—not in this version of reality. He just hadn’t known it was an option, before. And now he had to focus.

Focus on the crew they did have. “Food’s done. Everybody grab what you want and head into the common room. We need to talk about the next assignment.”

Zeb, standing by the cabinets, took a stack of plates and tossed them to Sabine and Ezra. Grumbling aside, everybody loaded up. Even Ezra caught the mood and looked around to make sure he didn’t take too much. But they weren’t that low, not yet. They still had the ration bars.  

“Okay, what is it?” Sabine asked, mouth full.

“Easy grab, difficult planet.” Kanan activated the display. “Tyrzin is the second moon of Kirtania.”

Zeb studied the map, chin in hand. “Awfully out of the way.”  

“And a huge pain to infiltrate. The whole place is covered in thick jungle. Predator lizards, river serpents… that’s just the big creatures.”

“Well that should be…awful.” Zeb pulled a disgusted face.

“Wait, it gets better.” The tap of a few buttons, and Kanan brought up the old Republic report on the place. “Here’s a list of the plant and animal life to avoid altogether. Pictures provided. Don’t blow anything up, Sabine, because we don’t want these spores in the air. We’ll wear masks with light filters, though if we avoid disturbing the wildlife, we shouldn’t need them.

“And they won’t protect us from the worst of it,” Hera put in.

“What’s that?”

Kanan skimmed a few paragraphs down the report. “The trees are radioactive.”

“What?” That would be Sabine, right on cue.

“Tell them about the safeties, love.”

“Right. We’ll have six hours down there, give or take, before the damage gets bad enough to need any treatment. Even if that happens, we’ll have a few more days’ worth of exposure before anything becomes irreparable. One of us will carry a rad counter, and anyone who goes down sticks together.”

“We’ll wear anti-rad lotion,” Hera added. “And I will personally watch you take potassium iodide before anyone goes down.”

“I hate that stuff.” Sabine made a face.

“That’s a pity, because you’re one of the two people going.”

“What? What’s the mission?”

Hera tapped a few buttons, zoomed in on a nondescript square building. “Fulcrum believes there’s a small Imperial base down there. They’re mining diamonds and trying to alter the substance into synthetic kyber crystals.”

“That Jedi stone?” Ezra asked, confused. “Why would they want that many lightsabers?”

“A crystal focuses energy for _any_ weapon,” Kanan told him. **“** Even something a lot bigger than an individual lightsaber.”

Chopper blatted out something, half-question, half-suggestion. _Get to the point_.

“Right. The mission is espionage,” Hera said. “If we stop the mining, they can always start back up again. If we stop the science team, they’ll just bring in new equipment and people. So…we gather intelligence and take it to Fulcrum.”

Zeb made a frustrated sound. “I’ve never found that intelligence pays much.”

“You’ve never had much to sell in the first place,” Ezra put in.

“Hey—focus.” Kanan glanced at Hera. “You want to tell them this part?”

“Yes. Ideally, we’d take Chopper to get the data fast. But there’s an easy entrance through a fourth-floor ventilation shaft.”

Zeb and Sabine both groaned. “Not another vent!”

Hera waited for them to finish before continuing. “He won’t fit. Sabine, you can make it, though, and bring a spike. Send a signal out to Chopper and let him do the rest.” This was the good part. “While Chopper’s downloading the data, we get to grab diamonds.”

Their eyes light up like Life Day.

“We?” Sabine asks. “You mean, like me and you?”

“Well, Kanan and Zeb won’t exactly fit.”

“You’ll have to watch yourself slugging through the jungle though, Sabine,” Kanan warned her. “Hera doesn’t react to bites and stings.”

Zeb snorted. “Yeah, I’ve seen her kill a scorpion with her fingers before. Good call.”

“I am also good at infiltration,” Hera pointed out primly.

“I’m good at infiltration!” Ezra protested. “Why can’t I go? I want to get diamonds, too.”

Kanan gave him the look he was quickly coming to think of as Ezra’s look. “Because the _last_ time you came on a stealth mission, you jumped off a ship and ended up knocking on the door. Remember that? That was last week.” 

“Well, I’m not sad about staying on the ship,” Zeb crossed his arms. “I don’t relish the thought of scrubbing anti-rad lotion and bugs out of my fur, anyway.”

“Sabine and me,” Hera reiterated.  “It should be a fairly routine thing.”

Chopper blatted something skeptical.

“What’s he saying?” Ezra asked.

“He wants to know why she had to say that out loud,” Sabine supplied.

“Look, two days there,” Kanan put in. “Everyone needs to be briefed and ready with backup. Sabine, can you make us some gassers? No explosions, but some sleeping agent might be nice.”

“You got it.” Finished with her plate, Sabine vaulted the table, then turned back to clean up.

Ezra rose to do the same.

“Ezra—”

He turned and gave Kanan that world-weary look he was already beginning to think of as Kanan’s look. “What?”

“We have time to get in some training tonight.”

“What? It’s usually free time after dinner.”

“‘Usually’ being the operative word.”

“Kanan—”

“We missed training yesterday, and we missed it the day before. You need to catch up.”

“And I’m thrilled to catch up. Tomorrow.”

“Ezra…”

The boy hung his head, defeated. “Fine. Good a time as any.”

“Good man. I’ll meet you in the hold in twenty minutes.”

“Right.” Ezra slunk off, but made no more protest.

“He is getting better, love. You have to admit that.” Hera considered a boiled carrot, plucked it off of her fork like a connoisseur. “He’s still mouthy, but you wouldn’t want him any other way.”

Zeb swallowed, added, “I’m still angry with you both about the bunk situation.”

They winced. “Zeb—” Hera started in.

“No, no. I get it, but I’m still angry.”

“Can you three talk less and eat more?” Sabine asked, perched by the sink. “I’ve got dishwater and plans of my own for this evening.”

Kanan saluted her with his fork and stuffed in another bite of meat substitute and flatbread. Schooled his face into neutral pleasantness, chewed thoroughly, swallowed it down. Force, that stuff was bland.

Hera was watching him, amused. “Not bad,” he said around the food.

 

…

 

Ezra held the lightsaber in both hands. One foot in front, weight mostly on the back foot, shoulder to the side, knees slightly bent. His feet were perfect.

His hands were a mess.

Kanan pitched a bottle cap at him. It didn’t hit Ezra, and the boy succeeded in not cutting off his own ear, but that’s about as far as it went. “Don’t think of it like a shockball scoop,” Kanan told him. “Look—let me see that for a minute.”

Ezra deactivated the lightsaber and handed it over, mouth grim.

Kanan imitated his grip. “When you do it like this, you restrict the range of motion in your shoulder. You’re not just aiming for a straight swing—” he followed through, bringing the blade across at shoulder level, swinging it forward. “That’s great for one blaster, but you want to be able to move in a full circle. Sometimes you’ll have to deflect in front of your body, but sometimes you’ll have to deflect here—” a half spin to the right—“or here”—reverse direction to the left. “You’ll need to shield the people on either side of you. If you’re holding it like a scoop, you can really only hit the one place.”

“All right, that makes sense,” Ezra frowned. “But my hands don’t work like that.”

“That’s why we train.”

“I AM training. I just can’t get them to go in the right direction!”

“You’ll get there.”

Truthfully, Kanan had no idea if the boy would get there or not. Jedi in the temple started with practice blades as soon as they could stand. There was no precedent for training a teenage boy with a dangerous weapon that required finesse, technical skill, and force-aided anticipation.

He thought of Master Billaba, as he had done any number of times in the last month. Everything with time and patience. He had a lot of the one, but not much of the other.

Kanan relinquished the blade. “Your turn again. Show me.” Ezra took it back, ignited it. Kanan adjusted his hands on the hilt. He didn’t blame Ezra for being frustrated. They looked awkward and uncomfortable.

“This is not going to work.”

“Just try. It doesn’t have to work today.”

“Fine.” But his tone was not happy. Four paces across the hold, and Ezra turned.

Kanan let him have it with the bottle cap as he was turning. Panicked, the boy swung wild. He somehow managed to avoid cutting a hole in the ship.

“Focus.”

“That wasn’t fair!”

“That’s what this discipline stuff is for. Fights are never fair. You get used to it now so you don’t get caught by surprise later.”

It hadn’t been a sneak attack. Not exactly, anyway. Kanan had hoped that maybe if instinct took over, Ezra would stop overthinking the grip and hit it. The boy was strong in the Force. He WAS. It just hadn’t worked.

Ezra visibly tamped down his frustration. “Fine, _master_. Again, then.”

Another cap, then another. The first two went well—Ezra hit the first one—but by the third, he had shifted back to the closed-fisted, tight-shouldered stance. “Fix your grip, Ezra.” Another bottle cap. He needed to thanks Sabine for her soda drinking habits.

“What? I’m doing it right.” A swing straight out from his middle. Kanan tried not to wince.

“Ezra… Loosen up.”

“I _am_ loose!” The boy tightened his jaw, straightened his arms. Even he didn’t believe his own words, but he’d be damned if he admitted it.

“Ezra.”

“I can’t do this, okay?!”

“Not if you don’t try.”

“You said I wasn’t supposed to try!”

He was so frustrated. Kanan knew the feeling, but he wasn’t going to succeed in anything if he couldn’t get past it. “You would be fine if you would just take a deep breath and get a grip!”

“Well, that’s just _funny_. I thought my grip was the problem.”

This wasn’t the way to teach. Kanan could _do_ it—he could do all of these things—he just couldn’t figure out how to explain them. He told himself not to take the bait, but his own frustration was there in his tone. “Just Calm. Down.”

“I am calm!” A blatant lie. “Anyway, you don’t sound very calm! I’m just not good at this.”

“You _will_ be good, you just need to _work_ at it.”

“Oh, so you admit that I’m terrible with a lightsaber. Maybe I’m not really some kind of special force kid after all.”

“I didn’t _say_ that. But you’ve got to stop choking on the handle!”

“Why should I train, if I’m just learning to do it the wrong way?”

“Because using a lightsaber correctly takes discipline, and that’s exactly what you’re lacking!” He was snapping now, but they were already past the point where that mattered. The boy would not understand. No, that wasn’t it. What if it was more than willful ignorance? What if he, Kanan, was not doing something he should be to get the message across? What if Ezra just _couldn’t_ understand?

He had to make this work. Try again.

“Ezra, don’t walk away. This training session isn’t over until I say it is. Ezra!”

But his padawan was already throwing down the lightsaber and storming out of the hold.

Kanan let himself throw one bottle cap at the deck in frustration before he called the saber to himself. That went well.

Footsteps on the ladder from the crew quarters. Not Zeb’s leap, not Sabine’s slide. Hera. “You want some help picking up the caps?” she asked, dusting off her hands.

“Yeah.” He glowered at the bucket, bending to the grab the first few. Ezra really ought to be doing this. This kind of thankless task was just what he needed to train him out of giving up when things got tedious. “I think they flew into all of the corners. Sorry about that.”

Hera shrugged. “Training room drawbacks.” They plucked bottle caps from the floor, from the tops of crates, from nooks and crannies, in silence.

Kanan broke it, because she didn’t deserve him stomping around and glowering.  “I guess you heard some of that?”

“Some of it. The loud part.” She considered. “Okay, most of it.”

“I’m messing it up, Hera.”

He saw her bite back her initial response— _No, you’re not_ —in favor of something he might be able to accept. “I don’t think it’s messed up, love. I think this is just how learning a completely new thing goes. It’s frustrating.”

“The worst part is, he’d be fine if he just let go of that frustration and loosened up.”

“He’s not bad?”

“Well, he’s not GOOD. But I think he could be. I just…don’t know how to get it across to him. And yelling doesn’t help.”

“Muscle memory,” she sympathized. “Learning is awful until it clicks. Did you never have that trouble with the lightsaber?”  
  
“Not that I remember. I was…basic, but I could hold the darn thing. But that’s not fair. I started before I could even remember. For all I know, I might have thrown temper tantrums.”

“He’s not really a student. That’s the problem.”

Kanan snorted. “Yeah, he’s not much of a student.”

“Kanan—” she gave him a look of remonstrance. “Not like that. But…he lived alone for so long. He learned to do so many things on his own. You won’t find anyone who’s more skilled or more resourceful in a lot of areas. And he did all of that himself.”

“With nobody watching when he made mistakes,” Kanan caught on.

“It’s tough to feel like a failure all the time. Especially when you’ve never encountered something that was beyond you, before.”

“And Zeb and Chopper certainly aren’t cutting him any slack… But I don’t know what I can do about that, Hera. He’s going to have to learn that he’s not perfect at everything.”

“Love, right now he feels like he’s not even good at anything.”

“That’s ridiculous. We wouldn’t have brought him aboard if that were true.”

“He doesn’t know that.”

“Well, he should!” But while that might have been true from a certain point of view, he knew it wasn’t fair.

“Look—”she sighed. “You can’t lose your temper. I know he’s frustrating and that it’s practically impossible to stay cool. I snapped earlier tonight, too. But you have to give him some sort of positive to work towards, not just criticism when he gets it wrong.”

“Hera, I try. I _try_. But I don’t want to insult the kid’s intelligence with flimsy compliments.”

“Well, we have plenty of opportunity for real ones. Maybe not during training. Just…find what he does well, and start your training there.”

“That’s…” _Find what he does well_ … “Actually, that’s a great idea.”

“Mmm hmm. So, what does he do well?”

He couldn’t resist getting a little bit back. “He makes me angry with his snarky comments.”

“Kanan—”

“Okay, he makes great snarky comments. He fits in with the rest of the crew.”

“KANAN—”

“All right, all right!” He put his mind to it in earnest. Why did they bring Ezra along on the last mission? The boy could do things that Kanan wasn’t as good at, that Sabine could only do if she patched into the system. He was a great thief, a great pickpocket—the Force probably aided in that. An incredible escape artist. Not great on the stealth yet, but he had some of the makings of an excellent cat burglar…

“He opens doors,” Kanan finally realized. “Ezra opens doors.”

Hera was grinning at him.

And now that he’d started thinking about it, he was struck by how fitting that skill was. Ezra had come aboard, and Kanan had grown into something like a Jedi, instead of just some force-sensitive smuggler. Ezra made him take a stand, a real stand against everything the Empire had taken from him. Ezra opened doors. “Wow, that’s symbolic. You already knew that. You set me up for that one.”

“No, I didn’t realize! It’s perfect! Ezra Bridger opens doors. So… what are you going to do about this?”

Kanan considered. “Well… You’re a fair lockpick yourself, but you could use an amazing one, couldn’t you?”

“What? No no no. We’re fine on this mission.”

“You wanted me to play to his strengths, Hera. What’s better praise than trusting him with an assignment?”

“I didn’t mean…” she sighed. He was right. “Fine.”

“Good girl.”

“Oh!” She had remembered something. “I meant to ask you for some input. Do you think we should fence the diamonds, or just sell them directly to Fulcrum?”

“Fulcrum offered?”

“Yeah, I think they could use them as weaponry. Actually… Do you want to hear about this?”

It was an offering of forbidden information, freely given. It wasn’t the first time. “Nope.” He was a bit curious, but he truly didn’t want to know. “Safer if you don’t tell me. Hera—I trust your judgment. And I’m not supposed to know.” She kept everyone’s secrets safe.

“Good boy. I trust your judgment too, you know. Even if you still have the habit of painting a target on your back at every opportunity.”

“What can I say? Sabine’s rubbing off on me. I just like the colors.”

She smiled. “Yeah, I think that’s it.” More seriously, “I worry about you, Kanan Jarrus.”

“The feeling’s mutual, Hera Syndulla. Be careful out there, okay?”

“Oh, we will be.”

She plucked a bottle cap from his hair and handed it to him.

 

…

 

Hera got to the Phantom first, ripped the cumbersome breather from her face, and started the engines. Sabine brought up the rear, pulling Ezra along with her. To be fair, the boy was weighed down. The echo of alarms, displaced by trees and thick air, sounded weirdly through the jungle. The scream of TIEs mobilizing above them. There wasn’t supposed to be this much air cover at a scientific base. This wasn’t good.

At least they’d gotten the information. And the diamonds. Now they just needed to get the heck out of here.

Ezra dropped heavily into a seat. Sabine rapped on the side of the Phantom on the way in. _Go._

“And we’re off!” Hera announced. “Like a hoard of wounded tortapos.” This was not the clean ending she’d hoped for. They couldn’t stay among the trees; she would bump the Phantom against all sorts of things, like this. She’d have to lift above the jungle—which meant up out of the fog—and take her chances.

All right, then. “Strap in this time, both of you.”

Sabine plucked off her own breather and shoved Ezra in the shoulder. “Hope you still meet the weight requirements for that seat.”

“Hope your mouth meets the weight requirements for that seat. Wait—what _are_ the limits on these, Hera?”

“Don’t worry about _that_ right now.”

Seven behind them. Too many, maybe. Hera took them down as close as she could to the tops of the trees. Somewhere… Aha! There was that canyon, covered with vegetation, its depth deceptive. She rounded a sharp turn and pulled up fast, leaving two of the TIEs obliterated against the canyon wall. Clearing smoke. Beeping sensors.

“Uh oh, what’s THAT?” Sabine shouted. “I don’t like the sound of that!”

“Visual confirmation,” Hera said grimly. Right in front of them. How many fighters? Somewhere in the teens. Overkill.

“Oh, no no no.” Behind her, Ezra shut his eyes.

Hera pulled the Phantom straight up into a loop—too slow, not as tight as she’d like. They must have taken a hit on the way out; the brakes were wearing thin on the port, and she didn’t have time to baby them. Three shots hit the shields before she got back into the canyon’s relative cover. She flicked the comm. “Specter 2 to Ghost. We’re going to need some cover and a pickup. Sooner would be a LOT better than later.”

Kanan’s voice returned. “We see them, Specter 2. Already on our way. Hold on tight.”

“You heard him, kids.” It was a testament to just how bad the situation was that neither Sabine nor Ezra protested the name.

The rocks and the trees were a help—they held still; she could dodge them. But there were just too many TIEs for her to buy them time. They were everywhere. She looped back to take out a few of them and tried to find a place to weave through, but there just wasn’t one. Lesser evil, then. The moveable object rather than the rock wall. Through the hole between fighters, too close…

The Phantom’s undercarriage scraped hard. “Shields are down!” Sabine yelled. A blast to their rear. Hera’s head snapped back and forth so hard her goggles flew down sideways and obscured her eyes. Yeah, that was definite damage. Still, they weren’t dead…

“Are you okay?” Hera yelled behind her. Ezra was screaming that something was on fire. She couldn’t hear Sabine. “Are you OKAY I asked?!” She had to take them down. She couldn’t see. Goggles first. Then a glance back. Both of them still conscious. She scanned the ground wildly for cover.

“Just land, just LAND!” Ezra was yelling. “This console is going to burn the entire passenger area.”

She out-yelled him. “I am NOT going to land right here and get you both blown up, so SHUT IT and let me fly!” 

Sabine was uncharacteristically quiet. “Gonna be impossible to dock the Phantom if you keep dragging her along like this.”  

“You are a lot more important than the Phantom.”

“What did she just say?” Ezra asked. “I think we’re going to die.”

There! An outcropping too thick to blast through from above. Covered by trees, so they might not even see exactly where she went. The TIEs would have to land and come get them. Hera dragged the Phantom the last several hundred yards with the whole undercarriage screaming of tearing metal. Oh, her poor baby. They hit the ground with the nose lower than she’d like, and with a sick lurch the tail tipped up and up.

“Uh, Hera—” Even Sabine sounded panicked now.

“Burning fuel burning fuel burning fuel!” Ezra scrambled front, the superheated fuel from the busted tank slinking across the floor towards them. For a moment they hung there in the air, death roiling closer. Then the bird slowly righted herself. The fuel spilled backwards. One more relatively tiny thud, and they had landed.

“Here!” Hera handed Ezra the fire extinguisher, and to his credit, he made quick work of the rest of the mess. She realized she’d left the comms on. Oh, poor Kanan.

Into the sudden quiet, he was shouting “Specter 2? Hera! Hera! Where are you?” He sounded hoarse.

“We’re all here. Rock outcropping. You won’t see us from the air. Here.” She sent him exact coordinates, then turned on her crew. “Are you two all right?!” Her own voice sounded strangely aggressive.

Sabine started to laugh. “Your goggles look absurd.”

“Specter 5—”

“My shoulder hurts,” she admitted, good soldier.

“Okay, just sit tight. Don’t unstrap yet. Ezra?”

“We didn’t die.”

“Does anything hurt?”

“No. No. I’m okay.”

They must have hit on Sabine’s side. Her own shoulders were stinging from the harness. She was pretty sure it would look horrific in a day or two, but it didn’t feel serious. The real surprise was that, hard as her head had snapped around, it didn’t hurt. It felt kind of like the static from inside a speaker, but no pain. “Kanan will be here soon, so…”

“I’m going to unstrap,” Sabine told her. “It’s probably just the collarbone.”

Why couldn’t Hera think of the next step? They had to get out. There was no place to go. Well, bad plans were better than no plans. “No, just sit tight. We’re driving this thing right onto the Ghost.”

Ezra’s eyes widened in disbelief. “Hera, did you see all that fire? Everything has holes in it. If you gun that engine, we are going to blow up.”

“Ezra, strap back in and watch less action vids.”

She looked for the power toggle, couldn’t seem to find it. Sabine was watching her closely. “Hera, I think you’re concussed.”

Ah, there it was. “Yeah, well, the Phantom’s in worse shape than I am. We’ll make it.”

On cue, Kanan buzzed in over the comms again. “We’re in position. Ghost’s shields are holding, but it is HOT. Get in here. Don’t wait; I’ll handle dropping the shields at the right time.” She eased the pedal carefully—most of their fuel had leaked—and coasted in on nothing but fumes from the still-hot engine. Brakes were shot, too. They bumped against the docking clamps, and Zeb worked some impressive magic with the magnetic lock to catch them.

Zeb was in the hatch before Ezra could open it. Sabine and Hera still hadn’t unstrapped. “Anybody busted up?” he asked.

Sabine answered first. “Mostly okay. Hera was _fantastic_.”

“Not good enough.” Hera turned towards Sabine. “Your head’s okay? Neck?”

“Yeah, I don’t carry part of my brain in my hair, like some people.”

Hera tweaked a strand of improbable orange. “Let’s all be thankful for that. Zeb, can you take her down to the common room?”

“Hey!” Sabine protested. “It’s just a collarbone. Nothing wrong with my legs.”

“Still…” Zeb made a magnanimous flourishing gesture towards the hatch. “Probably a lot more comfortable if I get you down the ladder.”

“Ezra, you’re really all right? Nothing hurts?”

“Hey, I’m as surprised as you are. I think we took the hit all on Sabine’s side. But Hera—are _you_ all right?”

She gave him a deliberate grin. “That kind of landing reminds me of my first flying lessons. I’ve had worse, don’t worry.”

He gave her a nod, reassured—he trusted her too readily—and followed Zeb and Sabine down.   

Hera hated to leave the Phantom like this. First, she checked the monitors. All of them were blinking red, except the ones that weren’t working. Zeb could get the external diagnostic going immediately. The Phantom was probably beyond repair, but it was better to know, at least. By the time she climbed down the ladder, her head was beginning to hurt, and Kanan’s version of fancy flying had evened out. They had gotten away. They were in hyperspace.

Kanan met her in the common room. “I saw those new signatures jump in and just about lost it. Force, Hera, that was…”

She tried to grin. “Hey, any one you can limp away from…”

He caught her in a hug that was a little too hard, and she started shaking.

“It’s okay. You did good.”

“I asked if they were all right and nobody answered me. That was the worst part.”

“They _are_ all right. You got everybody out.” He held her a little tighter. “You did good.”

She took a deep breath. Get it together, Hera. “We need to talk to them both again about prompt response in a combat situation. I get it, adrenaline’s pumping, but they still need to answer.” Honestly, they had done okay. It was her own fear that needed assuaging.

“Okay. That’s easy enough. How’s the Phantom?”

“Hanging on by her proverbial fingernails. Chopper got all the data, right?”

“Sure did. And the diamonds…?”

And finally, there was some good news. She grinned at him.

His own hopeful grin in response. “Would you say there are a _lot_ of diamonds?”

Enough to fix the Phantom and still indulge a little.

“I would say your padawan is an impressive thief.”

His hand never left the small of her back as they walked down towards the makeshift medical bay where Sabine and Ezra were no doubt spilling their pockets, the contents of their packs, and, in Ezra’s case, gloves and boots and rolled-up sleeves, as well.

“Any one you can limp away from,” he repeated.

“What do you want to do tomorrow?” she asked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to ShannonPhillips, coltdancer, and coldlikealime for helping beta this one.


	11. Six Years, Eight Months Post-Gorse

“Hera, go back. Hera, turn around.” Ezra kept up a steady stream of speech as she flew them to the Ghost. When the docking clamps locked into place, he finally admitted that he wasn’t going to convince her, and snapped, “What is WRONG with you, Hera?!”

Sabine put herself between him and the pilot’s seat. “Back off. She didn’t want to leave Kanan any more than you did. Somebody had to save you. And me. And Zeb. And Chop. We’ll go back for him.”

But Hera didn’t need her protection. Not now, anyway. She was still in battle mode. “Right. First we finish the mission.”

Sabine warning, “It won’t take them too long to find that spike.”

“Everyone out. Now.”

In the common room, the jury rigged transmitter sat waiting on the table. Ezra got there first and held the microphone out to her, but Hera shook her head. “No. Not me.”

His eyes widened in surprise. He took a look around at the crew. Not Zeb, that expression said. 

“If we’re going to do this, we have to make it count. Make it a real symbol. We can’t use a hardened terrorist.”

Zeb snorted, choking back a laugh.  

“A transmission from Lothal has to be the voice of Lothal. You do it, Ezra.”

“What?”

Kanan wasn’t here to center him. But Kanan had taught him so much already. She would have to help him recall that. “Remember your training. Focus.”

He took a deep breath.

“Can you focus?”

He nodded, no longer angry. Determined. Good boy. He crouched over the table, face serious and still. In his profile, Hera caught a glimpse of the man he would become.

“Not much time. You know what you want to say?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

“Okay. Sabine, flip the switch.”

“My name is Ezra Bridger. Years ago, my parents, Mira and Ephraim Bridger, were arrested for broadcasting the truth over an independent station. They spoke out against the Empire’s lies, and…and I’m here to do the same thing. We have been called criminals, but we are not. We are rebels, fighting for the people. Fighting for you.”

He took a breath. Sabine gave him an encouraging nod.

“I’m not that old, but I remember a time when things were better on Lothal. Maybe not great, but never like this. I see what the Empire has done to your lives, your families, and your freedom.” He was gaining momentum, now. “It’s only going to get worse unless we stand up and fight back. It won’t be easy.  There will be loss and sacrifice. But we can’t back down just because we’re afraid. That’s when we need to stand the tallest.”

Hera could cry. Even Zeb looked proud. If only Kanan could hear him.

“That’s what my parents taught me. That’s what my new family helped me remember. Stand up together. Because that’s when we’re strongest. As one.”

A static feedback. “That’s it,” said Sabine. “They figured out a way to blow the system.”  

But Ezra had been perfect. They had accomplished something. They might win.

“Was it worth it? Do you think anybody heard?” he asked.

She had no idea, but the moment felt right. “I have a feeling they did.”

His fist clenched on the table. “This isn’t over.”

“No. It. Isn’t.” Hera took a deep breath. “Grab what you can. Sabine, how many grenades do you have?”

“Maybe five? We used most of them.”

Kanan was in Imperial custody. The Empire knew that Kanan was a Jedi. The Inquisitor had taken him in personally. He had been captured, held down, hands bound. Unable to fight. Unable even to shield himself against any blows they might deliver. She could imagine needles, surgically sharp knives, even stormtroopers’ boots—those scenarios she could play out in her mind—but she didn’t even know what techniques they might use on a Jedi. Kanan was in Imperial custody. Kanan woke up in cold sweats, running from this fate in his dreams.

They were going to act calmly and decisively. She wouldn’t show anyone the swift panic cutting through every part of her body, telling her to go get him _now_.

“All right, we can make do. Load them up. Grab anything else that might explode, too. We’re going to need a lot of cover.”

“Hera, my love…” That was Zeb, trying not to be too patronizing. “We just got our arses handed to us by a fraction of the force that’ll be guarding the Imperial complex. Not to mention that Inquisitor. How are you planning on doing this?”

“He’s right,” Sabine reluctantly concluded. “We can’t go in guns blazing. We’re going to have to plan something out.”

Ezra, self-righteous and afraid, did not see things so reasonably. “You can’t just leave him there! I’ll go if you won’t. Come on, Hera.”

Chopper blatted out a resounding agreement.

Ezra started up the ladder into the Phantom, heard nothing behind him, turned back around.

“You’re not…” His earlier determination faded. He looked like a child again. A child who had just been abandoned. “You’re not going to come, are you?”

She kept her head straight, but she felt her lekku sinking. They were going to have to brace themselves for things to get a lot worse before they got better. “We need a plan.”

Chopper let her have it with a string of what she was pretty sure were blistering insults, but Ezra just stared her down, angry.

“I’ll go check the networks, see if I can find any news about him or the tower,” Sabine said quietly. “Come on, Chop. You can help me hack some stuff.”

Chopper told her where she could put her hack. This was the first time Hera had seen Sabine too subdued to take the bait. The girl just said, “Come help me find Kanan.”

Zeb took Ezra’s arm, shook his fingers off the ladder with what passed for gentleness, tugged him towards the doors. “Come on, kid. You can help me get the ammo ready.”

Hera was profoundly grateful for their tact. Left alone, the day caught up to her in the form of a dull headache. It was dawn, and none of them had slept. She wouldn’t worry about the more emotional effects of today. It wasn’t time yet.

A cold cloth—that would help. Then she could take over searching the datanet so Sabine could make more grenades. She made it to the fresher on autopilot, then immediately recognized her mistake. His brush, his hair still on the counter.

They had been in the fresher together that morning, door open, getting ready for the day. Kanan, newly shaved, frowning at the scale. “I think I lost weight.” Hera, toothbrush in mouth, patting her own thigh, unconcerned. “I think I found it.”

Kanan’s mock leer in the mirror. “That sounds delightful.” But she’d stopped his hand mid-grab, shooting him her best stink eye across the room.

Kanan laughing, “Easy, there.”

Hera laughing back, spitting in the sink. “You’re the one who started it!”

Then he had turned on the music to wake everyone else up—they had to be out in an hour to pick up supplies, and fresher shifts took time—and they had sung along, loud and off-key. “We always win the fight. Your left hook and my right.”

“Hey, this is fun! Whose is this?”

“Ezra’s, I think.”

“Surprisingly not bad.”

Not much room for dancing along in the fresher, but they had both been in a silly mood. “But if things took a dive, I’d be by your side.” She’d bumped against him and knocked him into the wall, producing a resounding thud.

Zeb had walked by, wiping sleep from eyes and mouth. Given them a long-suffering stare. “What is wrong with you two?”

It had been a good morning. Hopeful. Normal.

She wiped his hair from the counter. Cleaning would have to happen eventually. And besides, they were going to get him back.  She didn’t have to cry about a few strands of hair. Soon she would have Kanan.

This wasn’t the end of the world.

But she did have to find him quick.

 

…

 

“How’d it go?”

“It didn’t.”

They flew in sympathetic silence back to the Ghost. That was happening more and more often lately, this closer connection among their team, sympathy that required no words. But Hera missed the banter.

Still no news. He was slipping away. She should have dropped the rest of the crew off and gone back immediately, before they had a chance to move him. She could have dealt with a few transport ships. At least those would be easier to get through than…wherever Kanan was now. Which was a moot point, if they couldn’t find him. She pictured a map of the galaxy from a childhood textpad, multiplied it in her mind by her later experiences of distance. Felt the galaxy expanding before her eyes, larger and infinitely larger, filled with empty space. For a moment she felt dizzy. It was so big. How would they ever find him?

When they got back home, the light on the cockpit console was blinking. A message, probably from Fulcrum. She’d take it in her quarters. Fulcrum had a wide network of contacts—maybe she’d heard something. Maybe this was the break they needed.

She locked the door behind her out of reflex, checked the message. Just a request for contact. She sent a message back and waited, during which time she looked around the bunk for something to put away. It was all tidy. Kanan had gone on one of his demon-possessed cleaning jags a few days before their last assignment and shoved everything into the storage compartments. Somehow he’d managed to fold and package it all neatly away, and she hadn’t been in the bunk enough to mess it up again. She wandered around for all of two minutes waiting for Fulcrum’s return call. It felt like ten.

 “Specter 2.”

“Fulcrum. Do you have news?”

“I do, but not about Kanan.”

Hera’s lekku dragged heavily on her head. Her head hurt. Fulcrum was Togruta herself, adept at reading the small signs that humans often missed. She must have seen that, because she responded with sympathy. “Losing Kanan is a very great blow to your cell. Nobody expects you to pick up right where you left off, Hera.”

“We’re not…we’re still functioning… we’re not _going_ to lose Kanan.” She took a deep breath. Stay objective, Hera. Professional.

“We have no news of him. There is little hope that you will find him. Certainly not without tactics so dangerous that you are likely to get your whole team killed. And if it takes that just to find him, what chance do you have of rescue?”

Hera shook her head. “I’m not going to abandon him. That’s not what we do.”

“Kanan knew the risks. Accepted them. I’m sorry, but you must focus on your next objective.”

Our next objective? “But Fulcrum, Kanan _is_ our objective. We can still find him.”

“At what cost? You? Your unit? The overall mission?”

Yes. No. …No. She would risk herself for Kanan. She risked herself for strangers every day. Rescuing him…that didn’t require a second thought. But she wouldn’t lead Chopper and Zeb and Sabine and Ezra into certain death. And the mission, it was bigger than what they wanted. Bigger even than Kanan.

“There’s something else Hera. The transmission Ezra was able to beam out has attracted attention. Not just from civilians, but from the highest levels of the Empire.”

Ha. They had hoped to reach a few systems, but nothing like this. “It was Kanan’s plan. I guess it worked.”

“Your mission was to be unseen, unnoticed. And now…”

A sudden stab of guilt. Her own words sounded defensive. “Kanan wanted to inspire people. He wanted to give them hope.”

“Well he was successful. But if you are caught…if _Ezra_ is caught…that hope will die. To protect your unit—to protect Ezra—you must stop your search for Kanan and go into hiding.”

Fulcrum cut the transmission abruptly.

Go into hiding? They were already hiding. They always hid. Wait—did she mean buckle down and stop doing anything? That was their next objective?

As opposed to leading her friends into…well, maybe not utter annihilation, but it wouldn’t be pretty.

Fulcrum had made her orders clear. And while they weren’t exactly a military operation—not yet—the Ghost was still free to take its own missions—there would be consequences if she disobeyed. She was ready to damn the consequences. What were they, weighed against Kanan’s life? But Fulcrum did have a point about the larger mission.

And much as she wanted to rush in and fight to the death to save him, he wouldn’t thank her. He was surely being tortured, if they hadn’t already killed him. (And no news was not good news on that front.) Give him something, at least. Don’t get caught. Let him know that you and the rest of the crew got away. He would want that.

Still, she felt like a galaxy-class traitor. She ought to be there next to him. Even if she couldn’t help…she shouldn’t have abandoned him.

Hera recognized this thinking as indulgent.

And then there was Ezra.

“To protect Ezra,” Fulcrum had said. Hera felt a frisson of anger at her core. Fulcrum knew her too well, and she’d made it personal.

Still, she wasn’t wrong. Ezra was not a fully trained Jedi. He was a child, not as useful to the Rebellion blow-for-blow as Kanan. But now he was the voice of Lothal.

And he was a child. She had a duty to protect him. He was a _child_ , with so much potential. Precious to all of them, precious to her.

Most of all precious to Kanan. Because Kanan would die someday—maybe already had. She would have to find a way to accept it. But Ezra had given Kanan a legacy and a second chance. A way to come to peace with the past that had been ripped away from him all those years ago. She found herself agreeing with Fulcrum, though for different reasons. Ezra was a path into the future.

And he wasn’t just a symbol. He was a _child_. She kept coming back to that. The same way she and Kanan worked as a team to complete a mission, they worked as a team to keep these children (not children. almost children) safe. If either she or Kanan had to take a hit in that effort, so be it. This went without saying.

So when it came to Kanan or Ezra—there really was no choice. They might be able to break Kanan out, or they might all die. Better one loss than six.

She knew this objectively. She could do the math. It felt all wrong.

This was one of those times to shut down feeling and do what was right, anyway. 

She caught the end of what Ezra was saying as she walked into the common room.

“He’s not gone. And he’s not in the Imperial complex.”

It could be wishful thinking on Ezra’s part. Maybe Kanan was already dead. But he didn’t sound like a willful kid. He sounded like he had some deeper knowledge.

…Assuming she could even distinguish between those two things. What did she know? She was willful, too.

Sabine’s exasperation: “We can’t make a plan based on a feeling.”

“Yes, we can! We do it all the time.”

Time to bite the proverbial bullet. “Not this time.”

They looked at her, confused, waiting to hear what Fulcrum had to say.

“We can’t go after Kanan. The Empire will be waiting with a trap.”

Ezra, still angry, still eager. She had trained hope into him, and he was too young to hold that and pragmatism in the same thought. “When has that ever stopped us?”

“We can’t risk it.”

Zeb and Sabine, exhaling like a punch in the stomach.  Ezra, not so willing. “Can’t or won’t?”

“Ezra there’s a bigger mission you’re not seeing.” _You_ , she couldn’t say. _The bigger mission is you_. “It can’t be jeopardized for…one soldier.” Who was she to demand more of the galaxy?  

“Soldier? He’s our friend. Hera, I can’t just forget that. And I can’t believe you would either. He’d do whatever it took to protect us.”

“He already did that when he sacrificed himself. Ezra—he’d want us to honor the choice he made.”

But he was still convinced that he could bend reality with the force of his own will. He stomped past her, angry.

Hera wasn’t under the illusion that she’d persuaded any of them. The whole room felt sulky, could turn to open rebellion at any time. She would need to do at least a little more damage control.  “Fulcrum has intelligence,” she told Zeb and Sabine and Chopper. “We’ve attracted some…attention. And that’s okay—” placating— “That means we’re doing our jobs well. But…Fulcrum believes—and I believe—if we try to go after Kanan, we’ll simply fail. And that won’t help him. At least give him his last few moments knowing we’ve gotten away, that he’s dying for a reason.”

Sabine’s incredulous stare. “Hera—you’re not serious. …You’re serious. I can’t believe…” She threw her hands up. “No. I just can’t believe.”

She heard her own sharp response, “You don’t have to believe. You just have to do what I say.”

Zeb stood, disgusted. Muttered something, but brushed by her and left without a word. That hurt a lot more than Ezra. He was a kid; she didn’t expect him to understand. But Zeb…

And for the first time, Chopper looked like he might electrocute her.

All right. She was going to have to make them obey orders. She hadn’t felt so alone in a long time.

Sabine shot her a look of betrayal so cold it could only have come from a teenager and climbed right up the ladder into the Phantom to get away. That also hurt more than it should have.

Back to the cockpit. If they were going into hiding, she could at least use the time to fix things up. Have everything in fighting order.

Zeb met her on the way. “You’re not serious, Hera. You’re going to change your mind, and we’ll go get him. Might as well be sooner, rather than later.”

Perfectly neutral. “I am serious.”

“There is no way you are going to leave Kanan.”

She snapped. “Were you not there five minutes ago? This is a sacrifice we have to make, for the team.”

He stood very quiet, looking at her. Thought about it for a moment. “You know what scares me about you, Hera?” he asked. “You’re strong enough to do what you _think_ is the right thing, even if it hurts every piece of your heart and soul. Once you get to that point, what’s to stop you from doing…well…anything? You ever made a wrong call, Hera?”

She stared at him. Whatever reaction he was hoping to provoke, it was working. She felt sick.

“What’s to stop you from murdering me in my bunk—if you think it’s the right thing to do?”

“That’s ridiculous. Why would I ever think murdering you was the right thing to do?”

“I don’t know. Never thought I’d see you drop Kanan like a hot potato, either.”

Zeb must have seen that he’d gone too far, his face contorting instantly into regret and sympathy. “Hera—I’m so sorry. You would never—” He held out an apologetic hand to her.

She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t break in front of them. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust herself to cry in front of Zeb—goddess knows, she’d done that before. But he was still desperate to save Kanan. If she showed a chink in the armor, a weakening of her resolve, they would never listen.

“Hera.” Her name was an offering of friendship.

She retreated to the cockpit and shut the door in his face.

Kanan wasn’t dead yet—she believed Ezra. When he was… Well, she didn’t know what would happen. She thought she would implode like a star going nova, then spread out again, thinner, cooler, less effective. But she wouldn’t die. She would go on, and even fight. She might never really heal, but there were people here in the world she still loved, people she could still help. Anything less would be selfish, a smirch on his memory. She couldn’t see how to manage it now, but this wasn’t the first time she’d faced blinding, dismembering pain. One didn’t really die from it. She told herself this, staring at Lothal’s afternoon sun, working hard to inhale past the crushing weight in her chest, because people who forgot how to breathe did, in fact, die.

 

…

 

Selfish, short sighted child. Stupid _child_.

Children could never separate their own desires from what was actually right.

Now he’d gone and told _Vizago_ …and _promised_ Vizago…Hera didn’t want to think about what. She had the knee-jerk reaction, still, to keep the secret, to protect Kanan. Now there was no more Kanan to protect, but there was Ezra. Ezra, who hadn’t been hunted. He didn’t understand how discreet he needed to be, in order to protect himself.

In order to protect all of them, if history was any indication.

“Hera, I know you’re mad, but—”

“Mad? Try furious. You just put all our lives in jeopardy. I gave you a direct order, and you disobeyed me.” This was a crew, and he was a crewmember. She was not his mother. He was not a wayward child. Things would be harder now, without Kanan. He would need to learn.

Ezra kept going, unrepentant. “Well, it paid off. I know how to find out where Kanan is… Maybe.”

“Maybe? All that for ‘maybe?’” _Maybe_ had never worked before.

Chopper chortled, a delighted, ominous sound _. Someone’s going to get it._

“Hera, none of us want to give up on Kanan.”

She was done being understanding. “And you think I do?”

She couldn’t do it anymore. Couldn’t pretend that things would be fine, that they would lick their wounds and recover, that this was an acceptable loss. Couldn’t have them angry with her. She would have to give in and break, or she would have to yell back. 

Ezra didn’t know that. But he had learned something else from watching Kanan talk to her—how to stop an argument in its tracks. “No, I don’t.” He swallowed, held his hands open to her. His body language made no apology. It said _, Are you with me?_  “That’s why I took this risk.”

She looked at Zeb and Sabine, scared and hopeful, shrugging in assent.

Okay. “Okay. What did you learn?”

Sabine and Zeb lit up, but Ezra, ever incorrigible, didn’t miss a beat. He had already known what she would say.

“I have a plan. And it involves Chopper.”

“All right, then.” If she was honest, she was so relieved that Ezra had forced her hand into this decision. ( _This wrong decision, this selfish decision,_ a big part of her mind supplied.) “Let’s go get him.”

They followed Chopper into the ship. For the first time in days, the air felt like hope.

“You’re still in an insane amount of trouble, by the way, all four of you. There are places on the Ghost you can’t scrub without scrubbing the skin off your hands. Now come tell me what you found.”

 

…

 

“I thought you were supposed to be the sane one. This whole mission is as crazy as those colors.” Hera kept replaying Zeb’s words, and she didn’t care.

Another hour. Just one more hour, and they would come out of hyperspace above Mustafar. _Hold on, Kanan_ , she thought. _Do you know we’re coming?_ After so many days, he couldn’t possibly know they were coming.  

How much her priorities had shifted. It felt good to admit that. She was never leaving him again. She—Hera—would still live and die for the rebellion, first and foremost. But the same way she couldn’t continue fighting if she caught on fire, she couldn’t leave Kanan behind.

 _And if we can’t rescue him?_ A pragmatic little voice asked _. If he’s already dead?_ It was a distinct possibility.

But that didn’t mean she was going to give up on him. She thought of an old line, from the philosophers her father had made her read and recite as a child—“A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.” She’d be damned if she didn’t play this out to the end. It felt good to be committed.

Still, Fulcrum had been right. She couldn’t jeopardize the greater mission. If any of the others were captured, they couldn’t tell anything. If Hera was captured… Well, there were worlds of things she didn’t know. But it would be bad enough.

She had once told Sabine that she was withholding information to protect her, should she be captured by the Empire. And Sabine had called her on it. “How does that protect ME? They’re still going to torture me. It seems like it protects your contacts. Which is fine! But don’t pretend like you’re shutting me out for my own good.”

Hera palmed a gel cap from the medical bay, headed to the empty cockpit, peeled off the piece of tape she’d hidden far back under the bow console of the Imperial transport before they left Lothal. All with gloves on. Potassium cyanide was a very old and ugly compound, but it was effective. She tucked it safely into a double gel coating, then slipped it into her glove and secured it with electrical tape on the inside.

If the others were captured, they would be tortured. But they might also be rescued. They might even escape. If she was captured, she would have to take steps to keep certain information safe before they frisked her. That was okay, too.

She’d met Fulcrum only a handful of times in person, almost always on a professional basis. When she had first been recruited, her mysterious source had talked about the necessity of ghost units like hers. They weren’t ready for a larger rebellion, out in the open, yet. Together, Hera and Fulcrum and others would help them get ready. “Amateurs hope. Professionals plan,” Fulcrum had said.  

Kanan didn’t have a tablet, because neither of them approved of such methods. There was always another way. There was always hope. He didn’t know about this tablet, either. _Amateurs hope. Professionals plan._ Well, she had hope. But she also knew enough to plan.

She would never kill herself because she lost Kanan. But she would die to protect him. And she would die to protect the Rebellion, too. _A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost_.

She didn’t call them to the cockpit, because they came on their own, a few minutes later. They watched the stars blur by in silence. Everybody knew what they were doing—there was nothing left to talk about, and none of them felt like small talk.

Then the stars skidded to a halt and they were over Mustafar, an angry, glowing eye. But it wasn’t Mustafar they noticed. It was the fleet.  So many Star Destroyers. Hera flew a slow approach as the bulk of those things filled the viewscreen.

Well, they were outmatched by even one destroyer. No reason to worry about four more. She forced her hand steady. “Ezra—is he there?”

Ezra’s eyes closed, not exactly concentrating, just…focused. She took deep breaths, drew years of her own calming techniques into her lungs. You always had about a minute more than you thought. They could wait.

“He’s there. He’s alive!” The boy pointed. That must be the Sovereign.

Hera breathed in past a sudden well of hope. With it returned fear.  “Sending codes.” Just like that, the Empire invited them in.

“Chopper, send in Sabine’s present.”

And that was how they took down an entire star destroyer without anyone else in the fleet knowing what had happened.

Then aboard the destroyer itself. The soldiers stopped twitching and began stirring almost immediately, and she realized—they all realized—that there wouldn’t be enough time. Running and shooting, same as ever. The blue glow of a saber in her peripheral vision, Ezra’s half-grown voice saying, “Stand back.” And she had to remember that, despite the power of that weapon, this was not Kanan. She could not just trust that he had this one and let him bring up the rear.

He did all right, though. He succeeded in jamming the door, and they had a moment’s peace to regroup. Sabine was even impressed enough to stop bossing him for a minute. “Pretty clever, kid. So what’s next?”

“Kanan is down that hall. I just cut off our only way to get to him.”

All right. He wasn’t as formidable as Kanan. But neither was he helpless. Ezra came with his own particular set of skills. “Might be our only way, but…it’s not yours.” Hera looked up, saw his face break into realization.  

Zeb gave him a boost into the vent and she wished him well and practiced letting that part of the mission go. Ezra was part of the team, and she would have to trust that he was capable, even of this crazy task. They didn’t have any extra people today.

Now they only needed to buy him time, and get out. “Let’s go. Let’s go!”

“To bay five,” Sabine said.

“Ah, Where your masterpiece is.” How convenient.

The trouble with Sabine’s armor was that you didn’t get to enjoy her outraged facial expressions in the middle of a fight. Her voice still spoke volumes, though. “That’s got nothing to do with it!”

Teasing Sabine lightened the mood. Sure, they were in the middle of a firefight with an entire destroyer, but nobody was dead yet. The jury was still out.

She just hoped they hadn’t lost Ezra as well as Kanan.  

Give him time, Hera. Buy him time, and don’t panic yet.

All right, that was enough time. “Ezra, we’re finding another way out. Ezra, can you hear me?”

No answer. She kept trying. And trying. Sabine threw another grenade. How many did they have left?  

Another wave of troops. Zeb pulled her around a corner and kept shooting. “Where are they?”

“Ezra, are you still there?”

Finally, a groggy answer. “I’m here.” What was going on in there?

“Do you have Kanan? Is he okay?”

A long pause during which the world screamed. Then his incredulous voice: “Yeah. I think he’s better than okay.”

She loved to run. She loved to fly. There was Sabine’s beautiful TIE.

Then a quaking beneath their feet, and all three had to jump and stagger to avoid falling. Something had rocked the ship hard. Kanan and Ezra, it had to be. Another tremor, and the ship started to list to the side. Whatever they’d done, it had caused some pretty catastrophic damage.

Time to get out of here. “Ezra, we’re in the TIE. Where are you?”

“On my way. Go!”

“We are _not_ leaving without you and Kanan.” She was not coming in here just to lose one more. No way.

And then she heard his voice. Not Ezra. Kanan’s actual voice. “Will you just listen to the kid? Don’t worry. I’ve got him.”

Ezra didn’t miss a beat. “You mean I’ve got you.” The banter. They were bantering.

And he was talking to her again, no more overheard or imagined conversations. “You take care of Zeb and Sabine. I’ll get him out of here. Trust me.”

She did. He would never risk Ezra.  The skies were singing with the tearing-metal shriek of a dying Star Destroyer, and all was right with the world.

Zeb and Sabine did not feel as good about their escape. In their defense, Chopper had taken off. No debris from the transport. He was just…gone. “I can’t believe that bucket of bolts abandoned us!” Zeb shouted in her ear. His knee jabbed her in the kidney. Sabine kept shoving him over as if he were a pillow she could squish to make more room.

And Hera was still just happy to hear Kanan’s voice. She wouldn’t let them die. The hard part was over. They always thought of something. So what if a hundred TIEs came at them? Kanan was free. He was beside her. And she was flying. She felt like the luckiest person in the galaxy.  

Of course, she still preferred to avoid the dying part. “We’ve got TIEs closing in.”

Sabine, in her ear. “How many?”

“Too many!”

And then the speed-stop of ships leaving hyperspace. Not the sharp diagonals of destroyers. She recognized immediately that this was something else.

The fleet. Chopper had brought the kriffing cavalry.

They flew as fast as they could towards the transport and the TIEs exploded around her in celebratory fireworks. This was victory.

And she thought: _Good for you, Fulcrum. You owe him this._

Docking took an unacceptably long time. And then they climbed out of the TIE, and the hallway between the two docking hatches stretched out too far, and she didn’t have any patience left.

Finally the door opened and there they were, half out of the hatch. Kanan, climbing up on his own power. Whole and expressive. His face couldn’t decide if it wanted to smirk or cry, and she kept herself from running to him only with the great pleasure of watching that face. Walked instead.

And then he had the nerve to give her a formal lecture. “I owe you all a great debt of gratitude. Even if what you did was rash and reckless.”

They hadn’t broken him. He was still the same old ridiculous, protective, serious Kanan. “You’re welcome, dear.”

Then his arms were around her again and she hugged him as tightly as she dared, not knowing the damage.

He squeezed back. He was standing. This insanely privileged moment—this was just normal. The rest of the galaxy could shove it. She, Hera Syndulla, had the very best life. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lots of Hera thinking to herself. That seems to happen when she's lonely.  
> Some references:  
> The song Kanan plays is “Hey Now,” by Matt and Kim.  
> “A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.”—Jean-Paul Sartre  
> “Amateurs hope. Professionals work.”—The internet attributes this to Garson Kanin. Kanin's friend Katharine Hepburn was a big fan of this line, too.  
> And of course, lots of dialogue from “Call to Action,” “Rebel Resolve,” and “Fire Across the Galaxy.”
> 
> Before you go, take a look at the chapter numbers, okay? We have two short chapters left in this story. Almost there!


	12. Six Years, Nine Months Post-Gorse

A lot of things had changed.

Training, for one.

Hera took a break from loading the Ghost to watch Kanan and Ezra across the huge cargo bay of the blockade runner. More room to practice. But the style was different, too.

Kanan said something to Ezra. The boy nodded. Then the flash of two blades, and Kanan was running at him, bearing down in an overhand strike. Ezra met the blade but also dropped, shooting his leg out, swiping at Kanan’s legs.

Kanan didn’t go down, but he did have to step back.

Zeb, watching the action from much closer, clapped at Ezra’s effort—half-sarcastic, half-impressed.

Ezra had improved so much in only a few months. To her untrained eye, he fought like a Jedi.

And then Kanan attacked again, a more classic style, lunging forward and using his weight against Ezra. Refusing to cut him any slack.

The crash-hiss of those blades, now a familiar sound to Hera, drew the attention of everyone else in the bay. The two Jedi finished warming up, and now the swings came faster. Two blades like waves, continually crashing—a pitched battle. All of the stevedores had stopped loading to watch them spar.

Hera took a seat on top of the crate she had been pushing.  For all of the intensity, the close fighting, something in their movement bespoke…not playfulness, but…fun. This was all part of an extremely competitive game for them. She couldn’t see Kanan’s expression from across the bay, but she could picture that grim smile. Good.

He hadn’t really been happy since he’d come back. No, that wasn’t true. That first night, after they’d gotten him safely tucked away in the Ghost with an IV in his arm and bacta patches all over his body…then he had given her that unguarded, vulnerable look, and simply said, “Thank you.” And every so often since then, she’d caught it on his face— _I’m really here. This is not a dream._

He hadn’t thought they would come for him.

Since, though…

They had patched him up physically within a few days. Bruises, lines of needle marks, burns on the thin skin over his ribs that bespoke torture she could barely think about… When she’d seen that, Hera had wanted revenge, plain and simple. She’d wanted to find whatever ship Tarkin had fled to and strafe the thing full of holes. But most of the marks on the outside had disappeared quickly.

The arrhythmia had taken longer to work itself out. Too many times he’d sat down in the middle of a sentence, breathing hard. That had scared her. It scared him, too, though he insisted he could tell the difference between a pumping heart and actual anxiety. This was just the former. Neither of them felt better about that. But he hadn’t sat down shaken and exhausted in at least two weeks, as far as she knew. 

Still, there were deeper problems. They had been working with the fleet since Mustafar, and Kanan didn’t like it. The timing wasn’t great—he needed time to hide and heal emotionally, and he hadn’t gotten that time. And she saw the way he treated the men in uniform, watching them out of the corner of his eye until well after they’d passed before he let his guard down. Hera was familiar with that fight or flight response; they all were. But Kanan had nowhere to fly to. And he was trying so hard not to fight, keeping his fear and frustration held down as tightly as possible. Inevitably, those instincts came out in the profoundly immature behavior he hadn’t shown in years—small acts of recklessness, thwarting her plans and claiming ignorance, jokes that weren’t really jokes. Little ways to let off steam so he didn’t blow up at someone.

He wasn’t really okay. So none of them were okay. But he was here, alive, well… They would get there eventually.

The boys had stopped sparring. Kanan pulled a practice blaster and handed it to Zeb. Ezra nodded that he was ready.  Kanan stepped next to him, behind the blade, his own lightsaber at his belt. She could imagine the conversation— _You can protect yourself. Can you protect someone else?_ Hera didn’t like the idea of him being hit with a stun blaster, didn’t like it at all.

Neither did Ezra. His determination showed in his stance.

Zeb threw up his hands— _All right, all right! Don’t blame me if this goes wrong._

“Hey, lady!” Bouncing footsteps. Sabine.

The girl bumped her in the side, and Hera obligingly moved over to make room on the crate. “Come to watch the show? Let’s hope Ezra doesn’t miss or it’s going to get a lot more interesting.”

“Might as well. Looks like break time for everyone else.” Sabine took a seat, chewing on her lip as she watched. Something was on her mind. She swung her feet against the crate in silence for all of a minute before nodding her head in Kanan’s direction and declaring, apropos of nothing, “He’s right you know, Hera.”

“Hmm? About what?”

“Military operations. What’s the difference between these guys and the bucketheads?”

“Sabine—there's a huge difference! They’re working to restore actual representation in the Senate, putting themselves at risk to stop the Empire’s abuses. And they don’t have to. Most of them are in powerful positions. They haven’t lost what we have.”

“Still—any big machine—people are going to get ground down in its gears.”

Hera smiled. “Going to be an anarchist, then?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I think I am.” But she was smiling back—there was no sting in her words.

It occurred to Hera that Sabine was all grown up. She had been about this age when she had gone out recruiting alone. Sabine, too, would leave them soon. She needed bigger and better things. Maybe more school—she was too smart to be wasted aboard the Ghost. Maybe a command position. Certainly a community of friends beyond just the five of them on the ship.

But not yet. Hera couldn’t stand that, yet.

Enough. She hopped off the crate and activated the anti-grav. “Here. Give me a hand with this.”

“All right. My point holds, though.”

“The one about gears?”

Sabine huffed. “I just think you’re selling Kanan short.”

“I promise you, I understand where he’s coming from. This kind of situation brings back a lot of memories for him…” The girl was frowning at the crate. Hera gentled her tone. “…and for you? That would make sense.”

“Yeah,” But Sabine shook off whatever mood had momentarily taken her. She’d rather debate than worry. “Look, so we’ve both got some pretty visceral problems with armies. I get that. But we’re not just traumatized—we also know things.”

“I’m not following you.”

“I just think you need to take Kanan’s concerns a little more seriously. Just because his perspective’s emotional… that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”

“So you’ve said.”

“And you’ve got a tendency to jump in and start waving the flag the second you see it go down. How do you even know what flag you’re waving?”

Hera sighed. They pushed the crates up the ramp and onto the ship. She and Sabine had gone around and around on this subject, even when it was just their own crew on the Ghost. And even to her ears, her response sounded like a speech given for the fifteenth time. “When you join any group, you give up total control over what happens. But you can't do everything alone. At some point, you're going to have to trust other people.”  

Catching the end of their conversation, Chopper put in his opinion.

“Thanks for the vote, but I suspect you want to stay wherever you can most effectively blow things up,” Hera accused him.

Another long string of tweets.

“And on the other hand, you don’t like being given orders. That’s fair, Chop. We know. Although… I wish the first time you had a divided opinion about something your reasons were a little less…”

“Selfish?” Sabine supplied.

“I was going to say disturbing, but that works, too.”

The thud of footsteps on metal behind them. “Out of the way. Jedi coming through.” Ezra ran up the ramp panting, dripping sweat.

“Shower,” Sabine told him before Hera could open her mouth.

“Yeah, yeah. A cool one. Do we have the water heating system fixed yet?”

“That depends,” Hera said mildly. “Have you fixed it?”

Zeb jogged up behind Ezra, clapping him on the shoulder. “Hot water, cold water, I don’t mind. Out of my way.”

Jedi or no, Ezra staggered to keep his place. “Hey, I’m first!”

“Better hurry then, kid. Huttball match starts in a half hour.”

Training was over. Kanan wasn’t a big fan of touring the Corvette. “Zeb, where’s Kanan?”

Zeb chucked a finger behind him, and Hera leaned out to see.

Kanan was practicing on his own now. Most of his audience had gone back to work. Something slow, not showy, no strikes or lunges. The forms he practiced in his room in lieu of meditation sometimes—not meant for combat.

Zeb shoved the last of the crates into place. “He's just finishing up. Don't worry--he’s on his way.”


	13. Twenty One Months Post-Gorse

Empire Day. He’d made it through another one, but not unscathed. Kanan watched the reports on the holonet with an old friend.

They had gotten too successful today. Hera’s crazy plan—no, her contact’s crazy plan—should never have worked. But it did, and the control boxes in the mines had gone down, and the prisoners had escaped. Most of them, anyway. And as they’d ridden away, it had felt like the first successful Empire Day in…ever. Retribution.

Then the garrison’s officers had pulled prisoners at random and executed them. The public broadcast said they had been killed while trying to mount an armed escape. The instigators had been caught and dealt with. Nobody breaks into an Imperial work camp and causes havoc (even if they weren’t called “work camps” on the official programming).

Kanan and Hera had been speeding through the streets, on their way home, when the bulletin aired on every holoprojector. Hera had slowed to a stop, and they’d watched. Five pictures, five bodies, and it was over. Then Hera had swallowed hard, and Kanan had said “Go.” She’d gone. It was already too late.

They could both do the math. Five pictures—the two of them weren’t worth that much.

Back on the Ghost, Hera had plotted a course for one of the desolate poles, knowing they wouldn’t be able to make it off planet tonight. Kanan had ransacked his room, and the galley, and the hold. Over the past year and a half, he’d gotten rid of almost all of his supply. He hadn’t used it much in that time, anyway. The hard liquor was gone, but through some miracle, tonight he had managed to find a couple bottles of wine—enough to feel guilty about, but not enough to send him comatose. Good.

Hera’s footsteps rapped down the hall, at the door. Heavy. Even her footsteps sounded tired.

She stopped at the door. An ominous silence. Then she let out her breath in a huff and crossed the room with a newfound energy, and he knew he was in for it.  “WHAT are you doing?” Clearly, she knew what he was doing. And clearly, she didn’t like it.

He raised the bottle to her in an irreverent toast. “I am screwing up this screw up day with a little more idiocy.”

She frowned.

“Relax. I’m never doing this again. It’s not helping.”

For the third time since he had started watching, the holonet blared the triumphant news of their deaths.

Hera sighed and took a seat next to him at the table. “Give me the other one.”

He raised an eyebrow at her in profile, wondering if she meant it. “Have you ever had wine before?”

Hera was all self-righteousness. “I have had wine on any number of a half-dozen occasions, thank you.”

He laughed at her. “I’m not wasting my meager supplies on someone who doesn’t appreciate it.” More than that, he didn’t want a tired and frustrated Hera getting drunk. “Get some water, instead.”

But she stole the unopened bottle from him and nabbed the corkscrew from the table. “I like it. It just always seemed like a bad idea to…” she considered, “…escape like that.”

“Oh, it is. But it really works. Except now it doesn’t, I guess.”

Under Hera’s ministrations, the cork was turning to pulp. Kanan took bottle and corkscrew and opened it. “You want a glass?”

“No.” She took the bottle back and toasted him with it. “To bad ideas.”

“To bad ideas,” he returned. “Speaking of bad ideas, should we both…?”

She waved a dismissive hand, but her face was still more frown than its usual playful frankness. “Chopper’s keeping watch. Nobody’s going to find us in a snowstorm anyway. And they’re not looking.” She gestured at the display. “We’re dead, remember? Everyone’s satisfied.”

The news was still on. Neither one could rally any more false cheer in the face of the announcer’s relentlessly cheery voice. They faded into morose silence, watching.

“You know, we didn’t kill them.” She spoke in the direction of the projector, but the words were intended for him.

“You so sure about that?”

“You can’t control what the Empire does.” She sighed heavily, and he got the feeling that she was repeating an oft-recited script to convince herself. “You can’t even control how the mission turns out.”

The voice in the back of his head—the voice of sanity—was screaming at him to shut up, let her comfort herself. He wasn’t drunk by any means, but he’d had enough to relegate that voice to the back seat. “Flimsy, Hera. I can control what I do. And I should have known they would need someone to blame. I’m not a moron.” A momentary pause. “Don’t respond to that.”

But the day was too serious for even a smile. He watched her face—twenty years old, almost twenty one. For the first time in their acquaintance, she looked like a child. Then she sighed, and she looked much older than she had any right to be. “Yeah. We messed up.”

Empire Day—invariably a downhill tumble into hurting everything he cared about. He let out a breath, running his hand over his face as if he could rub off some of the clumsiness. “I’m sorry.” He should have…what? He should have done something. If he had been more accustomed to using the Force, maybe he would have felt their fear, and he and Hera could have… what? Turned back around to help them? Well, it might have worked.

She shook her head, genuinely confused. “Sorry for what? You told me it was too risky.”

“I think I said too gutsy.”

“Yeah. I thought that was a compliment. My fault.”

Kanan took a long swig. Hera sipped slowly. “You want to try again tomorrow?” she asked, tired.

He sighed. “I don’t know. Yeah. Yeah, I do. But I have to stop letting people get killed, or _my_ afterlife is a grim prospect.”  

He’d meant it to be facetious but it came out a little too self-pitying. Hera gave him a sympathetic smile. “Oh, Kanan. You don’t still think we go anywhere when we die?”

That brought him up short. He knew that the Force was real. He had lived with it since before he could remember. Maybe we didn’t get to keep our selves—our personalities and our memories—he hoped we did—but at least something was out there, waiting for us at the end of the day. Even if it left us high and dry until the very end.

Hera had turned back to the news, a little embarrassed about being so glib. He checked her bottle—maybe a glass gone from it? Maybe two? Enough to bring on the inappropriate honesty. He hadn’t considered that in risking her life, she thought she was risking annihilation.

He wasn’t ready to talk about that yet. So he proposed a toast—“To death and Empire Day.”

She raised her bottle, giving him the benefit of the doubt. “To death and Empire Day?”

He smirked. “May they meet each other and leave the rest of us alone.”

A laugh. They drank.

The story had changed—an extended report on this year’s celebrations. “This is a bad day for you anyway, huh?” she asked.

“Yep.”

“Want to talk?”

“Nope.” Although… He trusted her. He didn’t really want to put forth the effort to get the feelings into words. But he did want them…out. Putting in wine on top of them wasn’t helping. “Maybe.”

She waited in silence.

“This is the day they wiped the Jedi out.”

“I know.”

He didn’t know what else to say. That statement had nothing to do with his own visceral experience. Watching the shock blaster hit Master Billaba under the chin and push her head back. Cutting down his own friends. Being tracked like an animal. Waiting underground as everyone he cared about grew cold and then extinguished… Slowing his breathing so as not to suffocate under the dirt. Waiting. He kind of preferred the general statement, honestly.

Across the table, Hera took his hand. “What did you do after the Clone Wars?” They never approached this discussion directly. Neither one of them was equipped for a frontal assault against the Empire—not in their work, and certainly not in memory.

He told her about the year that he drifted, watching Janus but never daring to approach. No extra clothes, not even a canteen at first. Not even a blanket. He discovered how versatile and necessary paper—physical paper—was, and he stole extra. He found a bigger pack in the trash, and it was like a step of evolution—now he could carry things with him. He didn’t worry about how impossible it would be for him to get anywhere hiding, a kid who knew nobody, because he didn’t have anywhere to go.

So he watched this stranger and pretended he had a friend. It was a piss poor plan, but he’d been full of those. Finally, the terror grew mundane and it wasn’t terrifying anymore, and he set himself about the business of getting work. 

Kanan had thought he’d grown out of that kind of mess, but here he was again. He finished the bottle with long sips, then put it down and found Hera watching him, her own bottle still half full. Hot shame filled him, and he realized that he was never going to drink away his troubles again—not when it meant leaving her behind with said troubles.

“You know, I never really believed that you loved alcohol quite as much as you claimed,” she said, bemused.

He shrugged. “I did.”

“You gave it up awfully quickly. And I never heard you talk about wanting a drink.”

He had also come to the conclusion that his cravings had been more psychological than physical. Replace them with something else to take away the emptiness, and the drink was surprisingly easy to give up.

Until the emptiness came back.

“What’s your theory, then?” he asked.

“I think you were hiding. Nobody looks twice at a drunk man.”

He laughed dryly. “Some of the places I’ve hidden, you NEED to be a drunk to survive.”

She smiled, playing along with the joke.

“Maybe I was hiding,” he admitted. “I was always hiding.”

The news story ended, and the next program began—a special about the founding of the Empire. Cameras panned over the old Jedi Temple.

Hera reached out and flipped the switch abruptly. “We’re not watching that swill.”  He recognized her expression—protective and furious. Get behind her, not in front of her. He’d seen that expression directed at himself before, but only when he’d been bleeding out.

“It’s all right,” he said.

But it wasn’t, and she saw that. And then Hera—gutsy—went for the frontal assault on his demons. “Were you at the Temple on Coruscant, on the first Empire Day?” Her tone was delicate—simply asking. He could choose to answer or no.

“No. In the field with my master.”

She laced her fingers with his and traced a casual design on the inside of his hand. She didn’t look at his face. No pressure. “It’s hard to tell what happened from the reports. The soldiers attacked the Jedi? They opened fire on you?”

He took a deep, shuddering breath and said the things he had glossed over. “They turned against us.” It should have been a neutral thing to say. “They turned against us, and then I fucked it all up.”

“It sounds like it was fucked enough before you got there.” She rarely cursed. She hated drinking. He was a bad influence on her.

“No,” he shook his head. “I had some choices. And I managed…to make all the wrong ones.”

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

“I think you should know this at some point.” _Then I won’t have to worry all the time that the other shoe will drop._

She waited.

He went into it with only half a breath. “We sensed it before they fired. Master Depa—She told me to run. But I didn’t. I didn’t do anything. I just stood there like an idiot.”

“I would have collapsed in a heap,” Hera told him.

“Well, I didn’t even have the presence of mind to do that. First I did nothing. Then she told me again—run or fight. So I—I fought. I should have run.”

“Why?”

“Because I got to choose whether to cut down my friends or run away from them. And I killed them. I thought about how hard it would be—for me—and then I did it anyway.”

“To protect yourself and your Master?” She wasn’t making a counter-argument. She was just asking.

“I don’t know. I guess.”

“They were shooting at you?”

“Yeah.”

She left it at that. “Then what happened?”

“I…planted my hands in the ground like this—” he cupped both of his hands around hers—“and I used the Force and I pushed. Then I climbed in and buried myself.”

He thought about it for a moment, then started laughing mirthlessly at the absurd symbolism of that burial. Hera started crying. Well, tears came ( _So that’s what it looks like when she cries_ , he thought), but her face stayed fierce and protective. Her finger traced designs on the inside of his palm, the pads of his fingers, scraping lightly at the calloused dead skin there.

Every bit of that fear and suffocation came rolling back full force. But he wasn’t really suffocating. If he tried, he could breathe. And pain as a thing that was filling him up—it was better than that hollow, horrible void that had been pain in the past.

That was when he told her. “Run. She told me to run. I’ll be right behind you, she said. I think I knew that she was lying. No, maybe I didn’t know. Maybe I should have known. It was just… Soldiers died. That was the big loss. Not Jedi. No matter how bad things got, if you held on long enough, somebody would always come help.” RUN. There had been a look on her face—determination not to fail. He choked on the words, swallowed the bitter bile, made himself say it. “And I ran.”

Hera was blinking at him now, dry eyed. He looked at the table so he wouldn’t have to meet her eyes. She would never abandon him—he knew that by now—but what would she think of him, her charge, not her partner, that overgrown child she was saddled with?

And then she spoke, voice quiet and raw with rage. “Nobody gets to do that to you.”

He didn’t understand. Master Depa had saved his life. She saw his confusion. “You look at me, Kanan Jarrus. No, I don’t care. That’s who you are now. You look right at me.” Eyes bleary, he did. “I will never let you be alone that way again. No, don’t look like that, I AM promising.” She must have had more of the wine than he thought.  “I can’t keep you from being hurt, but I can keep you from being alone.”  

“Hera—” It was important to him that she understand. “They killed her. But I _ran_. And I didn’t even run fast enough.”

And her fury softened as he watched her understand.  “Kanan… Is that your worst secret? That’s the thing you could never reveal?”

He looked away, an ashamed confirmation.

“Oh, Kanan, I already knew that.”

Was he such an obvious failure?

She shook her head. “Look. I knew you _survived_. I knew you were a child. Somebody protected you once because your death would have saved nobody. And now you are an adult, and you have saved—what? Tens of thousands? Your master was going to die no matter what. And you took her death back and made it mean something. Look—” She held her palms up, open. Leveling with him. “I am going to tell you something, over and over again, whether you like it or not. And you are not going to believe me. But you’ll hear it, anyway. What happened to your master is not your fault. Nothing you could have done would have changed it. Other people killed her. Just them. You did the right thing. You are a good person, you always have been, and you did the right thing.”

He didn’t believe her. He never would. But he did close his eyes. She sighed and threaded her arm through his and let her head rest against his shoulder. They stayed that way for a long time, and it didn’t feel bad. 

Later he made flatbread, and they moved to the galley and gobbled it up, both ravenous. The wine was gone long ago.  The sun would push up over the horizon soon, and exhaustion rather than alcohol kept them honest. He fiddled with a trinket from the galley shelf, an aquamarine animal of some sort with cartoonishly gentle eyes. Hera didn’t have much that was purely ornamental, and this one looked to have been broken at the neck and re-glued at least once. “He’s tough,” Kanan commented.

“Hmm?” She had leaned her head back against the headrest, tired but not wanting to stop talking. “I can’t believe he’s still in one piece. I’ve had him forever.”

“Sort of one piece.”

“Oh, yes. I broke him the day we left home, and I cried and cried. My grandmother glued him back together again. Actually…” she sat up “…that’s the last memory I have of my house.” A frown. “And my grandmother.”

At the Temple, they’d taken current events classes. All the younglings had listened eagerly to the campaigns of the Jedi generals. He just hadn’t realized that the little he knew of Ryloth might include her own life. “You—you were one of the refugees at the Battle of Ryloth, weren’t you?” Cham Syndulla. Of course his family would have been caught out on the plains with the others.

She nodded.

He cursed, low and impressed, and earned an awkward shrug in return. “Do YOU want to talk about it?”

“Oh, it’s not… It’s not a sore spot. I only remember it in bits and pieces. We got off so easily. I think half the population was used as human shields, and we never were. Food was…tight, for a while.” Something dark passed over her face for a moment, before she shook it and told him, matter-of-fact, “That was when we lost most of the families, right at the beginning of the war. Not because of the fighting. We just didn’t have food or medicine, for a while. Until Father got the lines re-established.”

Kanan, who had known hunger himself, had never had to stand by and watch others go hungry at least. He gaped at her.

Hera shrugged again.  “It sounds a lot worse than it was. I was only about six or seven. All I remember was being terrified and wanting my mother. She was right there, and I still cried for her.” A laugh. “Funny the things we think can fix everything. You know there’s nothing she can do, and you still cry for your mother.”

Kanan couldn’t remember being six. He certainly hadn’t known that the masters couldn’t fix everything. He’d been twice that age before such a thought had occurred to him.

He wondered if he was projecting his thoughts when Hera mused, “You know what I didn’t think about until much later? My mother was in charge of dividing up the food. I remember the expression on her face, and feeling so afraid of it, and not knowing why. I didn’t realize until years later that she was deciding which child got to eat.”

“Hera!”

“Kanan.” She smiled. “Listen, all this…trauma. It didn’t shape me as much as other things. The expectation of discipline. Being told that it wasn’t time to rest because all of our work wasn’t done yet. Hearing that heartache was frivolous… It wasn’t a few dramatic moments that made me, it was things like that.”

He was horrified by the whole situation and it was far too late to do anything to help her. She ate the flatbread and enjoyed it immensely.

“How do you do that?” he asked, feeling like 13-year-old Caleb again.

“Do what?” she asked, chewing.

“How do you keep investing yourself in everyone, knowing you’re going to lose them? How do you let down your defenses and give people a chance?”

She considered, thrown by the question. “Well, for one thing, I’m not sure I do. I am very guarded.”

It had never occurred to him that her steadiness might be a form of wariness. On the other hand, he had often thought about how furious she got at injustice, and how closed-mouthed she was about any problems of her own.

“But… I had some very bad years.” Hera was still thinking aloud. “Not long before you met me, I was a total mess. I still got the job done, but I took stupid, stupid risks.  I just…didn’t die, I guess. And then I got sick of it. All that pain seemed repetitive.”

This time he took her hands. He suspected her version of “total mess” bore little resemblance to his own.

Her nail drew curlicues into his palm. “You know when you panic? It feels like everything is happening NOW again. Today’s a panic time for you, isn’t it?”

“Every year.” He was too tired for much more anxiety at this point, though.

“That doesn’t happen to me anymore. Not often, anyway. Eventually, it just all seems like…past tense. Yeah, it was horrible. But that was then. Some day you look back, and that other you… It was you. And you accept that. But this is a different you, and right now…you’re happy.” She was looking at something over his shoulder. Her eyes snapped back to his. “Eventually.”

Kanan considered. He still felt like bantha dung, but there was something underneath that. Something shocking. “I think I’m happy right now.”

“Right now? Today?”

“Well…no…maybe not happy.” He couldn’t wash his hands of today or any of the previous years as easily as that. He couldn’t stop caring just because it was convenient. He had a weakness for attachment. What did he feel, then? Guilt and grief and love and…yes. Joy. Too many things.

Hera waited, curious.

He loved Hera. He had known that for a long time, first despairing of it, then as a matter of fact, the way he knew his hair was brown, and lately, as she drew closer and that flirting banter took on an edge of sincerity, with a wild hope. Outside, the snowstorm that was keeping them safe and undetected obscured the sky. If they’d been out in it, it would have ripped the skin right off of their bones. But they could feel no traces of its fury inside the Ghost. He considered all of these things thoughtfully, as once he would have held them balanced in his mind with the Force.

“Not exactly happy right this second. But… I like my life.”

Outside, the snow. Here, Hera’s smile was the sunrise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What does "finished" mean, really?


End file.
